Did Game Of Thrones Cast Earn $300,000 Per Episode? Here's What Emilia Clarke Has To Say

British actor Emilia Clarke, who played Daenerys Targaryen in HBO's hit show Game of Thrones from 2011 to 2019, addressed the big rumour that the main cast earned a whopping amount per episode.

Seven years after the show's finale, there are rumours that Clarke and her co-stars were paid $300,000 per episode. Here's what she said.

Emilia Clarke clarifies Game of Thrones salary rumours

Clarke, in an interview with Variety, said the reported salary was exaggerated. “We didn't earn that much,” she shared.

“Can you imagine? I'd have been driving a couple of Porsches,” added the 39-year-old actress.

Clarke didn't reveal the cast's true salary, but said that she paid off her parents' mortgage with the remuneration.

Game of Thrones was a global and cultural phenomenon, and Clarke “spent a lot of time trying to understand the global fame,” which was frightening and puzzling for her.

She then realised “it’s just a formula: The less you’re on TV, the less famous you are. It comes and it goes.”

Clarke is grateful for everything that the show gave her. She “no longer feels trapped in it, or trapped in the result of being in it.”

She feels lucky that it happened to her and “even luckier that I’ve had time to understand what that was, and now I feel firmly on the other side.” 

Clarke had earlier opened up about how her feelings about Game of Thrones have changed over the years.

In an interview with PEOPLE in 2024, she said, “The more distance I have from Game of Thrones, the more I can quantify it.”

“When I started, you don't know what you're doing, you don't know what you're surrounded by and you don't know what you're taking part in.”

“Now, as more and more time goes between it and me doing it, the more I'm like, that was incredibly special and that was incredibly rare,” she added.