Emilia Clarke Reveals What It Was Really Like Working with Sophie Turner on ‘Game of Thrones’

Emilia Clarke and Sophie Turner have worked on the same TV show (ahem, Game of Thrones) for ten years, but they’ve never shared a scene—until now.

As Game of Thrones promos have teased, Daenerys Targaryen (Clarke) and Sansa Stark (Turner) finally unite forces in the show’s ultimate season. Its’s something we’ve been keeping our fingers crossed for since Sansa became Lady of Winterfell, but how did Clarke feel about working with her longtime friend?

The 32-year-old actress opened up about the experience during an interview with Bazaar.com. The IRL Khaleesi called working with Turner—drumroll, please—“lovely.”

She shed further light on the meeting of two queens, saying, “She’s a really good friend of mine, so it was very fun, it was very silly, it was very then like, ‘Oh! We’re doing this now. We’re having, like, an actor discussion,’ as opposed to just me and Sophie. With all of those scenes meeting new people, it felt like every day was a little party.”

Clarke also reflected on having her character meet the Starks for the first time, saying, “It’s really surreal… You’re coming into someone else’s turf and you’ve got a lot of actors that you know really well, who were like, ‘This is our home.’ Then you come in and you’re like, ‘I know this only from the television; I’ve never been in this space here before in my life.’” (Same.)

But Clarke didn’t let the new-kid-on-the-block vibes make her nervous. If anything, it allowed her to dig deeper into Daenerys’s feelings. “I must admit for the character, I felt it,” she explained. “I felt with every one of those moments that obviously the show is packed to the gills with. I felt for her. I was like, ‘Yes! Here we are! We’re in, we’re speaking with Sansa, we are that much closer.”’ It felt great. Very, very exhilarating.”

She also likened the experience of wrapping Game of Thrones to taking a bra off for the first time in ten years so, yeah, exhilarating sounds about right.