The latest addition, a BB-Gel base that suits most skin tones, reminded me of a biographical detail tucked into a cover story in this magazine. Clarke’s maternal grandmother, conceived in a subcontinental love affair, hid her half-Indian identity in a cloud of powder. “My granny kept that secret, that shame that she felt, to her grave,” Clarke said, reflecting on the pressures of assimilation. It’s a world away from today’s shade-adaptive formula, designed to meet the wearer where she is.
Even with beauty’s shifting currents, Clarke learned immutable lessons at home. Her mother, having worked with Revlon, could see through hollow sales pitches to the products that really worked. She also taught her daughter simple hacks: Vaseline as a lo-fi brow gel, and the fact that blush is just a “pigment—you can use it which way you want,” recalled Clarke. She never had a London rebel phase, a clash of Manic Panic hair. “I was a little bit emo for a while and had an obscene amount of eyeliner on, but I think I was just trying to hide.”
That impulse still resonated when GOT came to a close. The show was the centerpiece of her working life in her 20s. Playing Khaleesi had been an escape, thanks in part to platinum wigs with “magical powers” and a Pavlovian link to confidence. “When it ended, I felt like I’d been dropped a thousand feet,” Clarke said. Suddenly she found herself grappling with events she hadn’t had time to process, including her father’s death in 2016. “I slowed all the way down because I had to, to gently build it back up again.” Instead of big-budget franchises, she is headlining her first West End play this March—The Seagull, adapted by Anya Reiss—alongside a half-dozen projects underway from her production company, Magical Thinking Pictures. “Everybody in our industry had to have had some element of magical thinking to be able to make art on any level, to be able to go, ‘I’m going to be a kid forever,’ ” she said of the name.
I wondered if living so long with Khaleesi—a character defined by outsize ambition—shaped the actor in some way. “I just think that ambition for everyone looks different at different stages of your life,” Clarke mused. “When you’re young, you see ambition as quite relentless. You win or you lose with ambition.” On the far side of four Emmy nominations and two harrowing brain injuries, what matters to her now is living a normal life with well-nurtured friendships and “work that is meaningful and impactful for me. I don’t care if it’s successful.”
Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Self-Defeating Chains? Something like that. But it’s not breath of fire that is her restorative release. “It sounds really hippy-dippy, but there’s this amazing yoga position called the humming bee,” she explained, slipping her thumbs into her ears and letting out a few mini-vibrations. “It’s a completely insular thing, and I promise you,” she said, eyes twinkling as I leaned out of her light, “it just resets your nervous system.”
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