Nobody will ever want to talk about Game Of Thrones again in a few days, so we might as well let it all out while we can. With the finale set to air tonight, the people of Westeros are still reeling from Daenerys’ decision to torch King’s Landing, but would things have worked out differently if she looked less like Emilia Clarke and more like, say, the Scarlet Witch from the Avengers movies? Probably not, because it was the writers who did it and not Clarke herself, but either way, Elizabeth Olsen noted in a recent interview with Vulture that she actually auditioned for to play Daenerys Targaryen on Game Of Thrones a very long time ago. The gods flipped a coin that day, though, and things did not go so well for the reign of Queen Olsen.
“It was the most awkward audition I’d ever had,” Olsen explained, saying she did a monologue from the first season from after Daenerys was burned and where she’s explaining to “thousands of people” about how she’s their rightful queen. It’s unclear what specific scene she means, as the show changed a whole lot from the time before its pilot was filmed to when the first season actually aired, but she had to do it twice because “they” (David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, presumably) didn’t know if they wanted it in a British accent or not. Olsen did both, but admits now that it was “terrible,” and it’s the one example she always remembers whenever people talk about a “bad audition story.”
Of course, years later, Elizabeth Olsen got her big break in a movie that also required her to put on a weird accent, so apparently this is just a weird specter that will always follow her acting career. Also, if Olsen had gotten the Game Of Thrones gig, does this mean Emilia Clarke would’ve been Wanda Maximoff and Olsen would’ve been in Me Before You and Solo? There’s a free What If? story for you, Disney+.