Emilia Clarke

Emilia Isobel Euphemia Rose Clarke was born on 23 October 1986 in London. She grew up in Oxfordshire. Her father, Peter Clarke, was a theatre sound engineer from Wolverhampton. Her mother, Jennifer, was a businesswoman and is the vice-president for marketing at a global management consultancy firm as of 2020. She has an older brother, Bennett, who works in the entertainment industry and was part of the camera department for Game of Thrones.

Clarke is part Indian, of maternal Indian origin. Her maternal grandmother was the child of a secret affair between Clarke's great-grandmother and a man from colonial India, and wore light make-up to conceal the darker complexion she had inherited from her father. She credits this background for her family's having a "history of fighters", stating, "The fact that [my grandmother] had to hide her skin colour, essentially, and try desperately to fit in with everyone else must've been incredibly difficult." She stated that her grandmother "loved India more than she loved England" and as such, when she died, sixteen-year-old Clarke travelled to India to scatter her ashes. Clarke has also emphasised her ties to India, stating that she loves her Indian heritage and sees it as an integral part of her identity.

Clarke became interested in acting at age three after seeing a production of the musical Show Boat. When she was ten, her father took her to a West End audition for The Goodbye Girl, a musical by Neil Simon.

Clarke was privately educated at both Rye St Antony School in Headington and St Edward's School, Oxford, which she left in 2005. In a 2016 interview with Time Out, she stated "I went to posh boarding schools, but I wasn't the posh girl at the posh boarding schools." She also stated that most of the people at her boarding school in Oxford were from Conservative backgrounds, which meant she and some of her friends often felt like outsiders.

After graduation, Clarke unsuccessfully applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She worked and travelled before enrolling at Drama Centre London, where she graduated in 2009.