Emilia Clarke has admitted feeling “really pissed” at the expert who developed Game of Thrones’ fictional languages, after reading that he thought her Dothraki pronounciation “sucked.”
David J. Peterson, who HBO hired as a full-time linguist on its hit fantasy show, has now responded to Clarke’s comments, saying that the actress had misunderstood what he meant, and that she “never had to be good at it,” as his intention had never been that Daenerys Targaryen would speak Dothraki flawlessly.
The topic came to light this week as Clarke appeared on Late Night With Seth Myers, where the Game of Thrones star admitted being hurt by Peterson’s comments in an article years prior.
“I put so much energy into learning Dothraki,” Clarke said on Monday’s episode of the chat show. “But the creator of the language, I read in an article, said I sucked at Dothraki. I was like, ‘What, bro?!’ It’s not real! It’s not a real language! I can’t suck at it because me saying it on the TV, that’s how it goes… Honestly, I was so hurt. And then really pissed.”
Clarke appears to be referring to comments made by Peterson in a 2017 Rolling Stone interview, where he said the following:
“It’s always funny to me to hear Emilia Clarke speak Dothraki. Of course, her character is not supposed to be fluent, and it really sounds… not fluent. It’s great,” he continued, “for her character, she understands and she can speak. She just doesn’t sound quite right.”
Now, after seeing Clarke discuss the matter publicly, Peterson has given a statement to Entertainment Weekly in an attempt to clear the air, insisting that the actress had done a “fine job… in that she was portraying a character who, through incredible hardship, is forced to learn a language she’s never heard before and eventually becomes functionally fluent in the manner of a non-speaker — and in a relatively short amount of time.
“I think Emilia may have misunderstood what I said, because I’ve never criticized her Dothraki,” Peterson insisted. “Why would I? Her character was never supposed to speak it like a first language, so she never had to be good at it.
“Criticizing any imperfections in her Dothraki performance would be like criticizing Colin Firth for stuttering in The King’s Speech,” he continued. “It would be entirely missing the point. In fact, grammatical and punctuation errors were built into many of her Dothraki lines — and these were included in the MP3s I recorded for her — for this very purpose.”
In a 2013 blog post, Peterson also assessed Clarke’s skills at High Valyrian — another fictional Game of Thrones language he helped develop. “I was delighted by Emilia Clarke’s performance,” he wrote at the time. “She really does speak High Valyrian like a natural. She missed a word or two here or there, but such will happen. Overall, I’m extraordinarily pleased.”
This week, Clarke said she was likely done with the fantasy genre after nearly a decade spent making and promoting Game of Thrones. “You’re highly unlikely to see me get on a dragon, or even in the same frame as a dragon, ever again,” she said.
Image credit: Lloyd Bishop/NBC via Getty Images.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
