Updated the gallery adding some outtakes from the Emilia (and Sam Claflin) Me Before You portraits for USA Today, and some gorgeous ones of Emilia for the Los Angeles Times! Be sure to check our gallery and enjoy them :)

THE VIOLET FILES – Emilia Clarke has been crying. The 29-year-old actress just said goodbye to her best friend, who had been visiting for the past month. “There were tears,” she says. “Two crying girls.” Indeed, friends and family are everything to Clarke. While she’s known for enjoying the company of dragons in her icon-making role on HBO’s megahit Game of Thrones, in real life the people close to the actress are “what makes me feel powerful,” she asserts.

Clarke splits her time between Los Angeles (she has a house in Venice) and London, which she considers home. But “ninety percent of the time I live out of a suitcase,” she says. In the wake of the season-six Thrones premiere [when VIOLET GREY met the actress], the suitcase is coming out, as Clarke heads off to Washington, D.C., for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. She is then flying to Kentucky to start work on what she calls her most demanding role to date, in the film adaptation of Joe Sharkey’s true-crime book Above Suspicion. “It’s an amazing, dark, dark drama—Phillip Noyce is directing. I get to play a drug addict—it is really gritty and I cannot wait!” she says with great zest. “It’s so incredibly outside my experience, and takes on a real story,” she explains of the role’s challenges. “When you take a piece of material that is already loved out of people’s imaginations and put it on screen, you know you’re going to make some people happy and some people unhappy.”

In preparation, she’s taking a deep dive into all things Southern, studying reference materials like history books and the documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (“It gives you a real insight,” she enthuses). The already lively Clarke becomes even more animated when discussing her craft: “Everyone’s got a reason for being the way they are, making the choices they make,” she says of her technique. “And if you can tap into those reasons, you can give a fully realized performance that’s lived instead of just being a job.”

Added in the gallery, a couple of Emilia’s portraits taken during the Variety: Actors on Actors session. Be sure to check them out! For more, visit the Variety site.

E!ONLINE – She’s no stranger to nude scenes and now Game of Thrones‘ Emilia Clarke has stripped down again.

The 29-year-old actress is featured on the cover of the magazine Violet Grey and in an accompanying pictorial, in which she appears topless with wet hair and also strikes more sultry poses in a slew of sexy outfits.

Among them are a long sleeve, sapphire sequined wrap gown with a plunging neckline and thigh-high split, as well as a long sleeve maize silk dress with dark, leaf-shaped beading.

Clarke has also appeared naked several times on Game of Thrones while playing ruler Daenerys Targaryen, most recently two weeks ago, in a fiery scene that reminded viewers just how powerful the “Mother of Dragons” is.

The actress talked to Violet Grey about how she gets into her character.

“Find out how the character walks,” she said. “You know what shoes she’s wearing—the way you hold yourself in heels is very different from the way you hold yourself in Crocs.”

Clarke also named her favorite body feature—and her answer may surprise you.

“I’m proud to say I’ve never had braces; my top teeth are just naturally straight,” she said.

You can catch Clarke on Game of Thrones Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO as well as in the new romantic drama film Me Before You, which was released this past Friday. (source)

LOS ANGELES TIMES – “Sometimes, I just come here and stare at all the pretty boys,” says Emilia Clarke. She’s standing in the middle of Gjusta, a bakery-slash-deli-slash-juice-bar in Venice that may also secretly serve as the national headquarters for Jesus impersonators.

“OK, truth be told, this is, like, a poser-y kind of place to go, I think,” she says, looking around at all the well-coiffed beards and Birkenstocks. “Everyone’s pretty, and everyone’s looking at each other, but the food is so good that I just cannot help it.”

Everyone is looking at each other, and especially at Clarke, even though they’re trying not to make it obvious. She insists that without the blond wig she wears as Daenerys Targaryen/Khaleesi/the Mother of Dragons on “Game of Thrones,” fans barely recognize her. But as she waits by the counter for a salad made of four zillion types of lettuce, it seems most of the patrons know who she is.

Maybe it’s all the ads that have been running on television lately for her new film, “Me Before You,” which is out this weekend. In the movie, based on Jojo Moyes’ bestselling novel, the actress plays Louisa Clark, a small-town girl in desperate search of a job to help support her working-class family. The only gig she can find is one no one wants: working as a caretaker for a wealthy young man who was recently paralyzed after being hit by a car.

Though Louisa has an, uh, eccentric wardrobe — she’s obsessed with floral-patterned high heels and bumble-bee-striped tights — she looks a lot more like Clarke than Daenerys does. For one, the character is a brunet, as the 29-year-old is off-screen. And she certainly would never stand stark naked in front of a crowd of onlookers as a building burned to the ground behind her.

Indeed, the filmmakers initially had trouble envisioning Clarke as anyone other than the fearless queen she plays on “Game of Thrones.” She’d only appeared in one major studio release prior to “Me Before You”: “Terminator Genisys,” last year’s reboot of the Arnold Schwarzenegger franchise, in which she starred as Sarah Connor.

“Frankly, I was a little bit skeptical,” admits Moyes, who helped director Thea Sharrock sift through more than 300 actresses for the part. “Like, the Mother of Dragons? How is that gonna work?”

But during her audition, Clarke took off her coat and accidentally knocked over a bottle of water — behavior that seemed totally in line with the clumsy Louisa.

“She got down on all fours and started apologizing profusely, embodying Louisa’s klutzy nature,” recalls Sharrock. “It’s amazing that she’s had the part of ‘Game of Thrones’ for so long, but I think fans of the show are going to be really surprised by her range in this movie. It feels like when people first saw ‘Pretty Woman,’ when Julia Roberts just popped and came to life and you went, ‘God, where did she come from?’”

Additional portraits from the Me Before You session have now been added to the gallery, with big thanks to our partner site The Claflin Place! Dedicate to Emilia’s co-star Sam Claflin. Be sure to visit it!