The Most Nauseating Thing Emilia Clarke Had To Eat For Game Of Thrones
While there has been a handful of stories about interesting — or even downright dangerous — sets of television shows made infamous over the years, Game of Thrones certainly has its own hair-raising history. From accidentally destroying an entire ecosystem to skinning real dead stag corpses for a scene, the showrunners left no gross stone unturned in order to evoke stellar performances from the cast.
Longtime Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke, who played Daenerys, was not exempt from the show's revolting tactics. As reported by Vulture, during the scene in which she eats a stallion heart to prove that she belongs among the Dothraki, Clark was told that the edible prop heart would taste like Gummi Bears. It's safe to say that the prop did not taste like Gummi Bears.
Clarke would later describe the substance as "sort of a congealed jam kind of thing. On the outtakes, there will be me heaving into a bucket. It's such a reflex, when you taste something that's just so revolting, you kind of instantly just want to get rid of it. It's safe to say that I didn't eat lunch that day."
The prop maker wasn't horsing around
According to prop master Gordon Fitzgerald (and as reported by The Hollywood Reporter), the fake stallion heart was designed with appearance and consistency in mind: "It really needed to provide some visible resistance when she bites into it. We settled on the same mixture of gelatin gummy bears are made of and it worked wonderfully — right up until the moment Emilia almost threw up."
But Clarke's disgusting on-set lunch didn't stop there. Per Business Insider, to keep the heart moist, the prop had to be given regular injections of fake blood, which had a vague taste of bleach. By the end of the scene, the actress was covered in fake blood from head to toe, even adhering to parts of the set long after the cameras stopped rolling, due to the sticky nature of the prop. In fact, Clarke disappeared from the set for a while, as the fake blood caused her to become stuck to her toilet seat, as E Online reports.
The moral of the story? Have your prop masters taste-test your stallion hearts first.