If you ever run into Emilia Clarke and request a selfie, only to have her turn you down, don’t take it personally.
During her recent interview with “Jessie Ware’s Table Manners” podcast, the “Game of Thrones” star revealed that she’s not posing for any more selfies after an awkward incident when a fan approached her to take a photo while she was in the midst of a panic attack in an airport.
“I was genuinely walking through an airport and I suddenly started having what I can only believe to be a panic attack brought on by complete exhaustion. I was on my own, I was on the phone to my mum saying, ‘I feel like I can’t breathe, I don’t know what’s going on,'” she explained.
“‘I’m there and the tears are coming out,” she continued. “I’m crying and crying, this guy’s like, ‘Can I get a selfie?’ And I was like, ‘I can’t breathe, I’m really sorry. Just having a minute.’ It was after a few moments like that where I was like, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’”
Despite her no-selfie policy, Clarke says she’s still happy to sign autographs, which she feels is a more personal one-on-one experience.
“When you do that, you have to have an interaction with that person, as opposed to someone just going, ‘Oi, give us a selfie, goodbye,’” explained Clarke, 33. “Then you have a chat and you’re actually having a truthful human-to-human thing, as opposed to it being this other thing that probably isn’t nice for them and isn’t nice to you.”
