Avengers Star Elizabeth Olsen's Daenerys Audition Was Her 'Most Awkward Ever'

Daenerys Targaryen's story arc on this season of Game of Thrones has generated a fair old bit of debate, to put it mildly. If you've not caught up yet, we'll just say that anyone who's named their child Khaleesi in tribute to the mother of dragons might want to keep a close eye on their two-year-old for signs of genocidal tendencies.

Still, it could have been very, very different if Emilia Clarke hadn't got the role, and it turns out that Avengers' Elizabeth Olsen - otherwise known as the Scarlet Witch - might have taken it if she'd not had an absolute horror of an audition.

"When I first started working, I just auditioned for everything, because I like auditioning," Olsen told Vulture. "And I auditioned for Khaleesi. I forgot that. It was the most awkward audition I’d ever had."

The scene Olsen had to do was "[from] after [Daenerys] just burned, and she’s making this speech to thousands of people about how she’s their queen."

Which is exactly the kind of meaty scene you want if you're going to go for a sizeable role in what was, at that point, a mid-sized fantasy show which had fairly oblique chances of success. You know all about the aborted pilot and the subsequent reworking of pretty much everything to do with it before Game of Thrones actually got to air, and apparently, things were still quite up in the air for Daenerys at the time Olsen came to try for the role.

"They didn’t know if they wanted a British accent or not," Olsen explained. "So, you did it in both."

A valedictory speech from a young Daenerys to the Dothraki which wanders between cut-glass Rada tones and your average mid-Hollywood power shout. That sounds terrible.

"It was terrible," Olsen says. "Anytime someone says, ‘Bad audition story.’ That’s one I remember."

This story originally appeared on Esquire.co.uk.

* Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.