Emilia Clarke

Emilia Clarke had almost nothing on her CV when Game of Thrones cast her as Daenerys Targaryen in 2011. The show then ran for eight years, made her one of the most recognizable performers on television and brought four Primetime Emmy nominations, which is the kind of role that defines a career whether or not the actor cooperates.

What she is good at is intimacy. Clarke can play someone addressing a crowd and someone addressing one person, and she is much better at the second, which is the opposite of what that particular part kept demanding. The strongest Daenerys scenes are the small ones, and her face does most of the work: an extremely expressive upper half, eyebrows included, which reads as warmth on television and can tip into broadness on a cinema screen.

Her film career has been a run of near misses. Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys was a reboot that did not take. Qi'ra in Solo: A Star Wars Story is a good performance in a film released into indifference. Me Before You made money while asking her to be adorable inside a story with a serious problem at its center. Last Christmas is the one where the comic timing she keeps showing in interviews finally reaches the screen. Since then she has been choosing odder things: G'iah in Secret Invasion, a surrogacy satire in The Pod Generation, voice work in The Amazing Maurice and The Twits. She is a better comic actor than her casting suggests, and the industry has not caught up yet.