The 28-year-old actress - who plays Daenerys Targaryen on the HBO TV show - has confessed she's the opposite of her character and embarrassed herself in front of "every single executive in HBO", when she danced the "funky chicken", "robot" and then fell upstairs at her audition, when she was an unknown talent just out of drama school.

Speaking to the Sunday Times Culture magazine, Emilia said: "I abstained from sugar for the whole three weeks before my final audition, to look my best. I walked into an auditorium filled with every single executive in HBO, and they gave me a Coke - so I began bouncing off the walls. I finished the scene, looked out to this bank of empty faces and said, in the midst of a pin-dropping silence, 'Is there anything else that I can do?' And ('Game Of Thrones' creator) David Benioff, in what I later found out was a joke, said, 'You can do a dance...'

"So I did the funky chicken. And then the robot. Then fell over on the way up the stairs. The antithesis of Daenerys. David and Dan (Weiss, co-creator of 'Game of Thrones') were showing me off for this important series they were asking loads of money for, then I go and do the bloody robot..da-dah!"