Game of Thrones alum Emilia Clarke appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers this week and revealed she was once told she "sucked" at Dothraki.
Way back in season one of Game of Thrones, Clarke's character, Daenerys Targaryen, was married off to Khal Drogo, a chieftain of a Dothraki khalasar played by Jason Momoa. Daenerys had to learn the Dothraki language, which meant Clarke did, too.
"I put so much energy into learning Dothraki,” Clarke told Meyers. "But the creator of the language, I read in an article, said I sucked at Dothraki. I was like, ‘What, bro?’ It’s not real! It’s not a real language! I can’t suck at it because me saying it on the TV, that’s how it goes…"
"Honestly, I was so hurt," she admitted. "And then really pissed."
You can watch the interview below:
Dothraki creator responds to Emilia Clarke's story
The Dothraki language was created by linguist David J. Peterson, who spoke to Entertainment Weekly about Clarke's claims.
“I think Emilia may have misunderstood what I said, because I’ve never criticized her Dothraki,” Peterson said. “Why would I? Her character was never supposed to speak it like a first language, so she never had to be good at it.”
“Criticizing any imperfections in her Dothraki performance would be like criticizing Colin Firth for stuttering in The King’s Speech. It would be entirely missing the point,” he continued. “In fact, grammatical and punctuation errors were built into many of her Dothraki lines — and these were included in the MP3s I recorded for her — for this very purpose… Emilia Clarke did a fine job with Dothraki, in that she was portraying a character who, through incredible hardship, is forced to learn a language she’s never heard before and eventually becomes functionally fluent in the manner of a non-native speaker — and in a relatively short amount of time.”
While Clarke did not specify the article in question, she may have been referring to a Rolling Stone interview Peterson did in 2017.
“It’s always funny to me to hear Emilia Clarke speak Dothraki. Of course, her character is not supposed to be fluent, and it really sounds… not fluent. It’s great for her character; she understands, and she can speak. She just doesn’t sound quite right.”
The linguist also praised Clarke in another interview with Vanity Fair in 2019.
“Emilia, thank you for everything you did. Your non-native, yet fluent Dothraki always sounded very nice, so well done.”
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