Game of Whoa: Horse bolts with princess

Even warrior queens get run away with from time to time, as actress Emilia Clarke recently learned the way on the set of HBO series Game of Thrones.

Daenerys Targearyen can lead an army of nomads, charm a brutal horse lord husband whose pecs could be characters of their own, and gobble raw horse heart in a ritual. But she needs to work on her half halt.

Actress Emilia Clarke, who plays the ivory-haired Mother of Dragons, was filming a scene along with 300 extras when her horse bolted, galloping off with her into a clutch of reeds. Fortunately, the actress was wearing slightly more clothing than in some of her scenes where she sports merely a bit of fur, or, say, the ashes of her husband.

At the start of filming, the 26-year-old told producers of the HBO smash hit series that she knew how to ride, according to horseandcountry.tv. However, it soon became apparent that her experience was rather limited.

“You ask someone: ‘Can you ride?’ and as an actor you’re trained to say ‘yes,'” Clarke told the Observer. “But it’s one thing going some riding on a Welsh holiday with your family.”

“I love horses,” Clarke told the Daily Beast. “I definitely can ride a horse in a field averagely well, but me on a horse with a lot of extras and a lot of cameras, while speaking Valyrian, I felt like I was like, patting the head, rubbing the belly, and hopping on one foot!”

Fortunately, Clarke’s costar Ian Glen, who plays Ser Jorah, was nearby. “He managed to calm me and the horse down at the same time,” she said.

Her unmounted scenes have been just as challenging as the ones on a horse. Nailing the scene where she eats a raw horse heart in a bloody ritual took all day. She had to eat 25 (fake) horse hearts without gagging to get it just right. “They tasted like congealed jam, with a hint of bleach,” she told horseandcountry.

There were no reports as to what caused the horse to bolt with the one true heir to the seven kingdoms of Westeros. Maybe he’d seen the horse heart episode?

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