Emilia Clarke and her mother made MBEs for setting up brain injury charity

The 37-year-old and her mother Jenny have both been recognised in the New Year Honours for their work setting up the brain injury charity SameYou.

The actress said she still briefly feels as though she is having another brain haemorrhage every time she gets a headache, and described how not being able to speak after surgery made her think “let this end now”.

Speaking from her London home, Clarke told the PA news agency that surviving two brain haemorrhages, which happened while she was filming the hit fantasy series, made her realise how “misunderstood and under-represented” brain injuries are, even though they affect one in every three people.

Her first brain haemorrhage, a bleed on the brain, happened while working out in a north London gym in 2011.

Clarke said she felt “fragile, sensitive and scared” after her brain injury and was shocked to find out how understaffed rehabilitation services are – with rehab becoming a key focus for the charity.

Her mother, Jenny Clarke, said that in the UK “you’re lucky if you get a few weeks of rehab, and then it’s just like falling off a cliff”, as she urged people to donate to the charity to help fund vital online rehab services.

Another focus for the charity for 2024 is mental health support, with Clarke saying that her second brain haemorrhage in 2013 “just took the wind right out of me from a mental health point of view”.

Clarke, who has set up a production company with exciting projects in the pipeline for 2024, said she did not want to go public about her brain injury, and largely kept it a secret from her Game Of Thrones colleagues.

But since she launched the charity and shared her story “thousands” of other people who have had traumatic brain injuries have approached her and she now feels “less alone”.

She said that the MBE was “wonderful awareness-building for the cause”, while Mrs Clarke said she believed she was being “pranked” when she first heard about it.

In an exclusive interview with PA, Clarke, who played Daenerys Targaryen in Game Of Thrones, said she “knew” she was being brain damaged during the first brain injury.

“I had just finished filming season one of Game Of Thrones, feeling very stressed, but optimistic and young, and I had no idea what I was hurtling towards,” she said.

“I was doing the plank and I just was kind of crippled with pain.

“I don’t know what science class I actually paid attention in, but I just had an understanding that I was being brain damaged.

“So I was moving my fingers and my toes, trying to remember lines from my show, saying my own name, saying my parents’ names, my friends’ names, just trying to stay conscious, because I knew I could slip into a coma very easily in this scenario.

“So I knew I needed to fight. (I thought) ‘I’ve just got a show, just got my first job, it can’t go wrong now’.”

She described feeling a “catastrophic amount of agony” which felt like “like an elastic band just snapping around my brain”.

She was whisked to a London hospital but medics did not immediately spot that she had suffered a brain haemorrhage and it took some time before she was sent to a specialist hospital where she received life-saving care.

“I remember just thinking ‘No, I’ve got to go, I’ve got a job, I got a life’.”

In recovery she was woken every two hours and was asked to say her full name aloud – Emilia Isabelle Euphemia Rose Clarke.

“One night, very late at night, I couldn’t say it, I was able to speak but it was no sense,” she said.

“I remember that was the only point where I just thought ‘let’s end this now’, because if I can’t communicate then I can’t be an actor, which is the only thing I’ve ever dreamed of being, so that was quite dark.”

Three weeks after first being admitted to hospital she was sent home but “24 hours later I found a reason to go back to hospital because I was so terrified”, Clarke said.

“That’s one of the bigger things that resulted in us having a charity that deals with rehabilitation, because while everyone is good at dealing with the problem, (there is less attention on) the repercussions of living with something that has gone wrong and you’re so fragile and so sensitive and so scared.”

Mrs Clarke, who left her senior role in a global tech firm to become chief executive of the charity, added: “So many thousands of people have written to us and echoed what Emilia said.

“The clinicians are fantastic, the therapists are wonderful, but there just aren’t enough of them and there aren’t enough resources.

“If you’re lucky in the UK you get a few weeks rehab and then it just it’s like falling off a cliff.”

Clarke said: “It’s so profoundly understaffed – I was given a remarkable nurse after I left hospital the first time but I was one of 300 people that she had (on her list), and I’m calling her saying ‘help I think I’m going to die, I’ve got a headache’.

“I still have it now, every time I get a headache there is at least four minutes where I’m like ‘Am I?’ and then you remember ‘no, no, brain haemorrhage results in throwing up, agony’.”

But the Solo: A Star Wars Story actress said that despite symptoms of fatigue and anxiety she returned to work quickly because she was “hell bent on living the life that I dreamed of”.

Clarke also had to have a second procedure in 2013 when surgeons in New York had to remove a brain aneurysm which was found through routine check-ups.

“The second one just took the wind right out of me from a mental health point of view,” she said.

“I really started to just close in on myself and kind of I didn’t want to look anyone in the eye, it was literally just such profound anxiety and worry and fear.”

Mrs Clarke said that one of the charity’s “big crusades” is to promote mental health and neuro-psychological support for people with brain injury.

Asked whether she had a lot of support on the set of Game Of Thrones, Clarke said she kept her brain injury “quiet” and only told “people who needed to know”.

“My HBO family took remarkable care of me and kept my secret,” she said.

“The night before we launched the charity, I turned to mum and said ‘I can’t do it, I can’t tell people’.

“Were it not for the charity, I wouldn’t have said anything to anyone, but when we launched it and thousands of people who responded, which made me feel less alone.”

Mrs Clarke prides herself on being her daughter’s number one fan, and described how she and other family and friends met Clarke at Heathrow with a sign and balloons, just to welcome her back from her first audition.

Meanwhile, when visiting her daughter on the Star Wars set, Clarke said her mother “got chatting to the person in charge of merchandise and within about three weeks, I still got that 25 boxes with my face on.

“And then mum thought it would be really funny to dress my whole bedroom with pictures of me… the duvet cover, the pillows,” she laughed.

Her mother replied: “While I’m really proud of her acting, it’s much more of who she is as a woman, just the the approach that she has to life.”

As a child, Emilia was “always happy, always really buoyant, always full of sunshine and love,” she added.

The women have both been made an MBE in the New Year Honours for the work they have done setting up their charity.

It is believed they are the first mother and daughter to receive the same award in the same honours list.

Mrs Clarke said: “It’s such an incredible honour, such an incredible privilege, and the most important thing for us is that it’s for everybody with brain injury.

“To have this near-death experience and to have gone through the sort of the darkness of it all, and then come out of it, we’re so lucky.

“It’s just so fantastic to be able to get up in the morning and really feel that you are, in some tiny way, really helping people.”

Clarke said the honour was “remarkable” and felt it was “life-enhancing and magical” to see her mother, who has also had brain surgery to remove a brain aneurysm, recognised for the work.

She added: “One in three people will get a brain injury – for that huge statistic to be so unknown and underrepresented, we feel like if we bring about an awareness and therefore an empathy and an understanding for those people, then we’ve done a huge amount.

“Our goal is to try and allow people to feel that after a brain injury, they are still the same person, the fundamental thing that makes them who they are, has not changed and will not change.

“What they need is they need care and kindness and they need a hand to be held and attention and voice and treatment and rehabilitation.”

SameYou has launched a new fundraising appeal to help provide neurorehabilitation to patients online.

Mrs Clarke said that the programme, currently operating out of London and Lancashire, would be rolled out across the UK as she urged people to donate £10 to fund one session for one patient.

Almost 1,000 people have benefited from the online support so far.

Clarke added: “The results that we’ve seen have been frankly life-changing.”

– To donate £10 to the appeal, and learn more about the charity, visit SameYou.org.