By You've probably heard the story about Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man, but it's worth retelling. Hoffman told Olivier he'd been awake for 72 hours to get into the same headspace as his character, to which Olivier said sarcastically: "My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?"
With that in mind, Olivier would probably give Emilia Clarke a massive thumbs up for the Game of Thrones scene she's most proud of, having told Vulture that it was the first time she ever rode a dragon way back in season five.
That wasn't just because of the end result, though - it was partly down to the feat of imagination and conviction Clarke managed to pull off in convincing herself that she wasn't sat on what looked, felt and sounded like a massive rocking horse.
"There’s one every three seasons where I’m like, 'that was okay!' The first time I got on the dragon, that was a good one," Clarke said. "It was amazing and then very funny at the same time because the actual filming of it was really basic, especially compared to what it is now.
"The first time, I was on a little riding-seat thing that had a [rocking horse noise], ee-err, ee-err, someone bumping me up and down. Now it’s a huge hydraulic system that has seven moving pieces and I’m strapped in. It’s all computerised and has a mind of its own."
Wobbling about on what looks like - and this is meant as no disrespect to the good people of the HBO SFX department - an oversized jungle gym covered in bits of black cardboard is slightly less self-consciously actorly than other cast members' picks for their most cherished scenes, but anyone can stare at a decapitated dummy and have a little bit of a cry. It takes some real skills to wear a (presumably stifling) wig and pretend to napalm an army of the undead.
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