NEW YORK, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- Emilia Clarke says the Dothraki language she learned for the fantasy drama, Game of Thrones, was excellent training for the fluent Russian she needed to speak in the new spy thriller, Ponies.
"Because I'm an idiot, I first read the scripts and everything's in English and then you sort of vaguely notice that there are italics and [those words are] probably going to be in Russian and you think: 'That'll be fine. I did Dothraki, goddammit,'" Clarke, 39, told UPI in a Zoom interview Tuesday.
"It was only then, when getting the shooting scripts through, you're like: 'What, what? That's too much,' and then the panic attack kind of began, got worse and worse, until I then got the correct Russian teacher and he daily managed that ongoing Russian panic attack," she laughed.
The White Lotus and Love At First Sight actress Haley Lu Richardson, 30, who plays Clarke's friend and colleague Twila in Ponies, joked that she suffered "secondhand exhaustion" from watching Clarke master the new language.
"You were so empathetic," Clarke told Richardson.
