A witless dig at Emilia Clarke’s looks spurred fans to rush to her defense.
The “Game of Thrones” star posted a photo on Instagram last week of her smiling face next to a mug that read, “You’re doing fucking great.”
Clarke wrote that it was a gift from her mom, adding, “it was important to share this newfound wisdom.” But the photo has not been received the way the actor intended by folks online.
“Lmao wow Daenerys Targaryen didn’t just hit the wall,” tweeted Jon Miller, a self-described gamer with nearly 100,000 followers, “she flew into it full speed on a dragon.”
Clarke was 24 when “Game of Thrones” premiered on HBO in 2011. She had starred in only one episode of television and small films before the role of Daenerys made her famous and also opened her up to public criticism.
She revealed in a 2019 episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast that she would cry before filming her sex scenes with Jason Momoa, as the whole process was entirely new to the young actor.
She most harrowingly survived a brain aneurysm rupture within weeks of wrapping the first season of the hit HBO show, only to endure another “excruciating” rupture after the third season, Clarke revealed in a deeply personal 2019 essay for The New Yorker.
“In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug,” she wrote. “I asked the medical staff to let me die.”
Fans have defended her from unwarranted criticism ever since, regardless of their opinions on her character arc in “Thrones” or its polarizing finale. That was very apparent in the flurry of tweets from Clarke’s supportive fanbase.