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“Game of Thrones” beauty Emilia Clarke whipped theater fans into a photo frenzy Monday when she stepped, naked into a bubble bath during her “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” debut on the Great White Way.Hoping to capture the image of the ravishing actress in her birthday suit, folks at the Cort Theatre audience ignored Broadway’s stringent “no photos” rule and frantically snapped shots on their cellphones, sources told The Post.
Things got so out of control that management at the West 48th Street theater has now beefed up security to keep the audience from sneaking further shots at the show, which started previews this week and opens March 20.“On Monday, it was a packed house including a huge contingent of fans of ‘Game of Thrones,’ ” said a source who was in the theater.
“What titillated the audience . . . was a full nude scene between Emilia and [male lead] Cory Michael Smith.”
The bath scene occurs after Clarke — who plays lead Holly Golightly in a new adaptation of Truman Capote’s novel — brings Smith home to her apartment to recuperate after he’s injured riding horses in Central Park.
“She undresses him and he gets in the tub,” a source said. “She then goes offstage and comes back in a towel. She takes it off and gets in with him.“So you don’t see everything. There are bubbles strategically placed.”
“If you’re sitting in the balcony you can see a lot more, ” another source smirked.
Photos taken at the show don’t appear to have made it to social-media sites yet, but one fan did tweet: “I would drink Emilia Clarke’s bath water.”
A rep for the show declined comment.
British-born Clarke, 26 — who plays platinum-maned warrior princess Daenerys Targaryen on HBO’s hit “Game of Thrones” — is no stranger to baring her assets in public.
The medieval fantasy is known for its randy characters and rampant nudity and sexual romps.
Clarke herself became an Internet video sensation after one particularly steamy scene on the show in which she slips out of a dress and walks naked into a hot bath.
Back in 1998, actress Nicole Kidman — also in her Broadway debut — caused a sensation, and sold a slew of tickets, when she appeared nude onstage at the Cort in “The Blue Room.”
Security was heightened for that show, too, but resourceful audience members got their fix by bringing binoculars to get a better view.-------------------The Heavy Mantle of Holly Golightly![]()
Hovering about Richard Greenberg’s new stage adaptation of Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” like a beloved, chatty relative who doesn’t know when it’s time to go home is the memory of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in the 1961 movie.
When the lights go down at the Cort Theater, where the show began previews on Monday, you expect her to sweep in any second, tall and swanlike, wearing her sunglasses and little black Givenchy dress and waving that ridiculous, yardlong cigarette holder.Instead, the Holly who shows up is tiny Emilia Clarke, best known to most of us from the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” in which she plays Daenerys Targaryen, the platinum-haired, often nude (it’s HBO, after all) queen of the Dothraki, hatcher of dragons and eater of raw horse heart.
Like just about everything Hepburn did, her performance in “Tiffany’s” is so poised and charming it’s hard to fault, and yet as several critics have pointed out — most recently Sam Wasson in “Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.,” a history of the making of the film — she’s actually all wrong for the part. She’s too elegant and not vulnerable enough. Capote’s first choice was Marilyn Monroe, on whose background he may even have drawn for Holly.
In his script Mr. Greenberg has taken pains to emphasize the lonely, frightened side of Holly and has not flinched from what the movie tried to ignore: that she makes her living by selling sexual favors. He has also tried to beef up the part of the narrator, a Capote stand-in known as Fred in the show.
But though this new version is much closer to the spirit of the novella — and spells out a gay subtext for Fred that is only hinted at there — Mr. Greenberg and everyone else associated with the show is aware that the whole thing depends on Holly. It’s a part that even Mary Tyler Moore, in David Merrick’s flop 1966 musical version, was unable to pull off. Finding the right actress, Mr. Greenberg said, was “kind of like the Scarlett O’Hara search of our time.”
The winner of that search, the 25-year-old Ms. Clarke, in real life has green eyes and auburn hair, not the bleached, strawlike mop of the Targaryens, and the self-possession of someone much older. Sitting at a table at a Chelsea hotel the other day she admitted to a couple of nervous moments as Holly, but not many.
“The first day of rehearsal I looked out and suddenly felt very sick,” she said. “But then Dr. Theater kicked in, and mostly it’s been joy, joy, joy.”Aside from liking fashionable clothes, Ms. Clarke doesn’t have much in common with Holly. She grew up in England, where her mother is an executive with an information technology company, and her father is a well-known sound designer for the theater. She went to fancy schools and has the accent to prove it. And she has benefited a lot from what she calls “the mystery that is luck.”
After being rejected by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2005 she took a year off, traveled around the world and applied to Drama Center London (sometimes called Trauma Center by its students), where she squeaked in off the waiting list.
“There were a lot of beautiful, blond, gorgeous girls in my year who got the Juliets and the like,” she said. “I got the Jewish grandmothers and all the farcical parts, which was actually really, really good because it made me aware of my capabilities as an actor.”
“Game of Thrones” was her first real job, and the call (to replace an actress from the pilot) came out of the blue, she said, during “a rather depressing year” when she was struggling to pay the rent. “I had never heard of the books” by George R. R. Martin, she added, “and so I spent 48 frantic hours Wikipedia-ing.”
At her audition she was given just two brief scenes: the one, early in Season 1, when Daenerys first stands up to her brother, Rhaegar; and the season finale, when she steps into the funeral pyre of her husband, Khal Drogo.
“This is going to sound odd or bizarre,” she said. “But just from those few lines I felt I understood the character. She’s a young girl trying to do good and to realize her own capabilities.”
Initially “Game of Thrones” was all that Sean Mathias, the director of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” knew about Ms. Clarke. In London in 2009 he directed another version of the play, with a script by Samuel Adamson and starring Anna Friel, which received decent reviews.
He thought he could do even better, he said, and he liked the idea of doing the play in New York. “It’s a New York story, it deserves a New York production,” he explained. And what appealed to him when Ms. Clarke’s name came up was precisely that she was young and unknown.
“In the book Holly is 18 years and 10 months,” he pointed out, “and I said to the producers, ‘What you really want here is to discover someone new.’ Then, when I met Emilia, I got excited by her beauty and her quality. She’s a tremendous mixture of truth and style, of heart and comedy, and you need that for Holly.”![]()
He added: “I think a more established actress might be too daunted to take on the mantle that belongs to Audrey.
A younger actress like Emilia — she’s more an open slate. It’s like what Michelle Williams did with Marilyn. It was so natural it wasn’t an impersonation.”Mr. Greenberg said of Ms. Clarke: “I’ve only been a visitor to rehearsals, but I’ve never seen her daunted. She’s so tiny and exquisite and ebullient. She gives off a sense of being unlike other people. There’s only one of her.”On the last day before moving into the theater (where the show opens on March 20) Ms. Clarke for the first time rehearsed the play’s final scene with Cory Michael Smith, who plays Fred. She was thoughtful and deliberate, sometimes pausing for a long moment to think over and absorb Mr. Mathias’s suggestions, and at first she edged into the scene, growing bolder with subsequent tries.
“I’m very scared, buster,” she said. “Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what’s yours until you’ve thrown it away.” Pursing her lips, she worked particularly hard on the following line, “My mouth’s so dry, if my life depended on it, I couldn’t spit.” Mr. Smith mentioned Marco Rubio, and the reference went right over her head.
Afterward Ms. Clarke said that she had been obsessed with Hepburn since she was 5, when she watched “My Fair Lady” nearly every day after school. But she said of the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” film: “What you’re seeing up there is perfection, and you can’t mimic or copy perfection.
You can take that and add it to your inspiration board, but then you want to go to the source, the novella, and break that down to its most finite part, which is that Holly is a girl who’s a product of the Great Depression, the great drought. You start there, attempting to understand her world, and then you realize that the stakes were so high for her because she has to stay mysterious, and the only way she can do that is by keeping on running.”She smiled and added: “There’s not much I can do about all the people who come in and hope for Audrey Hepburn. I just hope they’re not terribly disappointed.”1 |
2Has anyone gotten a chance to see this in previews?
