Looks can be deceiving!
Emilia Clarke didn't feel very sexy shooting the cover for Esquire's "Sexiest Woman Alive" issue. The magazine bestowed the Game of Thrones actress with the title last year. And while it was an honor to join the ranks of Penélope Cruz, Mila Kunis, Angelina Jolie and other stars, Clarke admitted on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Thursday that it was a "funny shoot." Until she gets replaced this fall, "I feel like I should have opened supermarkets or something with that title."
Clarke has dared to bare before, as fans of her hit HBO series are well aware, but posing for a racy pictorial was a different experience. "Doing those kind of sex scenes on camera is one thing, but doing it as yourself, I need alcohol to do. That's what I needed," she recalled. "They just kept giving me vodka, and I would be like, 'I'm just going to keep the duvet. I'm going to keep the sheet up.' They'd be like, '3, 2, 1, go!' and just yank it down. You'd be like, 'Oh, no!'"
The actress said she's "not really naked" in the photos. "Just sort of."
"That's me Photoshopped and drunk," she said. "That's what I look like."
Ellen DeGeneres confessed that she hadn't joined the Game of Thrones bandwagon until she got a major case of FOMO. "I heard that it was violent and I was scared to watch it. I was like, 'I don't know if I can watch this show.' Everybody kept raving about it and I was like, I have to watch Game of Thrones because I'll be the only one not watching it.' So, I binge watched," she told Clarke. "I watched the entire thing and I'm obsessed and I can't wait for it to come back."
Clarke, however, "still doesn't quite see" how huge the show is. "It's just one of those things. You're sort of in it." In fact, it wasn't until her brother called to say The Simpsons had dedicated its show opening to Game of Thrones that she realized, "Oh, God we made it! We did it. We did it!" As for her parents, she said, "They're happy and proud and think I'm doing just about fine."