Game Of Thrones star Emilia Clarke has discussed how there is “quite a bit” of her brain missing after suffering two aneurysms.

Back in 2019, Clarke spoke out about the aneurysms, the first of which she suffered after completing filming on the first series of the HBO hit series.

Yesterday (July 17), the actor – who played Daenerys Targaryen in the show – spoke again about the experience during an interview on BBC One’s Sunday Morning talk show.

“The amount of my brain that is no longer usable – it’s remarkable that I am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions,” she revealed.

Of the brain scans she has since received, Clarke said: “There’s quite a bit missing! Which always makes me laugh.

“I am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that.”

She added: “Because strokes, basically, as soon as any part of your brain doesn’t get blood for a second, it’s gone. And so the blood finds a different route to get around but then whatever bit it’s missing is therefore gone.”

In an essay for the New Yorker back in 2019, Clarke explained that she began to feel a bad headache while getting ready to work out and had to push herself through her first few exercises. “My trainer had me get into the plank position, and I immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain,” she wrote. “I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn’t.”

Clarke said she took a break and made it to the locker room “almost crawling”, where she was sick and the pain got worse. A woman in the next stall came to help her and she was taken to hospital, where she was sent for an MRI scan. The results revealed she had suffered a “subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain.”

“I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture,” the actor explained, adding that she then underwent  “minimally invasive” brain surgery. “This would not be my last surgery, and it would not be the worst.”

In 2013, while working on a Broadway play in New York, she then had a brain scan that revealed the growth on the other side of her brain had doubled in size.

Elsewhere, Clarke is set to appear in new Disney+ series Secret Invasion, alongside Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury and Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos as well as an extended cast including Kingsley Ben-Adir, Olivia Colman, Christopher McDonald and Killian Scott.

Last year, the actor opened up about joining Marvel and what she loves about the comics powerhouse, saying: “I just think what they’re doing right now is so exciting and so cool, and so on the cutting edge of it. I feel like they’re like the Apple of this world.”