Emilia Clarke on 'Terminator Genisys,' Fate of 'Game of Thrones' Character

Emilia Clarke is taking on Sarah Connor.

ByABC News
July 1, 2015, 8:22 AM
Emilia Clarke arrives at the Los Angeles Premiere "Terminator Genisys" at Dolby Theatre, June 28, 2015, in Hollywood, Calif.
Emilia Clarke arrives at the Los Angeles Premiere "Terminator Genisys" at Dolby Theatre, June 28, 2015, in Hollywood, Calif.
Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic/Getty Images

— -- Emilia Clarke is well known for playing Daenerys Targaryen on HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones,” and now she’s taking on another popular character: Sarah Connor.

In the upcoming film “Terminator Genisys,” Clarke takes on the iconic character originally played by actress Linda Hamilton.

In an interview with ABC News’ Jesse Palmer, Clarke talks about her excitement about getting to utter one of the iconic lines of the franchise: “Come with me if you want to live!”

The opportunity to repeat the line was “pretty amazing,” the English actress, 28, said. “There was a lot of pressure, I think, surrounding that particular line, so we did a couple of takes,” she added.

It actually took about 12 takes, Clarke said, explaining, “We did it so many times, probably not the first time and then me trying to make it funny was probably not appropriate either, which I found out. Like take 12 they were like, ‘Seriously, just do it well.’ I was like ‘OK,’” she recalled.

True to the character, Clarke had to do training for her fight scenes and handled some heavy weaponry for the role, including a 70-pound grenade launcher.

“I remember when I first fired it because I got to fire the real guns first of all, which was scary as anything. And then doing the blanks, you could hear it for a whole state or something; it was ridiculous. I just wanted to be badder than the boys,” she said.

Palmer also asked Clarke about the shocking finale of the fifth season of “Game of Thrones,” in which several key characters, including Jon Snow, died.

When she read the script and learned about Snow’s planned fate, Clarke said it was “heartbreaking.”

“Obviously, I read all of the scripts and I get a little emotional but that one I was like, just burst into tears, stuck it in the freezer, called David and Dan and was like ‘What the hell? You can't do this,’” she recalled, referring to the show's co-creators, David Benioff and Daniel Brett "D. B." Weiss.

Then, she went out for a drink with actor Kit Harington, who played Snow, "and was like 'you’ve got to tell me the truth' and no matter how many beers that boy drunk he was still like, 'Yup, dude, I'm dead. That's all I can say.'"

Asked whether she felt her character on “Game on Thrones” was safe, she replied, “I keep asking them and they are like, ‘You are going to have to wait and see, and I'm like, ‘Oh, that's really funny but seriously, am I going to die?’ So who knows.”