Her big-screen roles, such as Qi’ra, Han’s enigmatic and deadly ex-friend in Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), as well as an alternate timeline Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys (2015), brought her into two of the most beloved franchises.

Developed for television by Kyle Bradstreet, the extraterrestrial political spy thriller is currently in the middle of its six-episode run on Disney+.

Clarke is animated while discussing the series.

“Yeah I get nerdy excited about it,” says Clarke as she expounds on the magic that happens both on and behind the stage. “I’m a theatre kid. I’m a theatre nerd.”

She describes it as her “happy place”, after having grown up around the stage. Her father, Peter Clarke, was a sound designer for theatres, and she traces her love of the magic of storytelling and acting to those childhood memories with him.

In 2022, she made her debut in London’s West End in Jamie Lloyd’s production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, which was initially postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Clarke cites the opportunity to work with her Secret Invasion castmates as one of the project’s main appeals. They are acting powerhouses, with innumerable credits on screen and on the stage.

“The cast is ridiculous,” says Clarke. “Olivia Colman, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Don Cheadle. I was like ‘where do I sign’?”

Secret Invasion involves a conspiracy by a faction of the Skrull – alien refugees that have been stranded on Earth since the events of 2019’s Captain Marvel – to supplant humans and take over the planet.

After patiently waiting 30 years for Nick Fury (Jackson) to make good on his promise to find the Skrull a new home, the shape-shifting aliens are ready to forcefully take matters into their own hands.

Unlike standard mainstream superhero fare that features a villain with clearly malevolent intentions, the show “asks the audience to make up their own minds”, says Clarke.

“It’s presenting the audience with a moral quandary and a very timely question … about refugees and about whether violence and war has an understandable reason for being or whether it doesn’t.”

In Secret Invasion, Clarke plays G’iah, originally introduced in Captain Marvel as a child who is the estranged daughter of Talos (Mendelsohn).

She was raised on Earth in a household that believes in coexistence and peace with humans. But after becoming disillusioned with Fury and her father’s failure to secure the Skrull a new home, G’iah rebels.

As much as Clarke, who notched four Emmy nominations for her portrayal of Daenerys Targaryen, downplays her acting skills compared with “the enormity of the amount of talent on this show”, it’s clear that her colleagues hold her in the highest regard.

Mendelsohn, a self-described Game of Thrones fanatic who has watched the series “cover to cover” four times, says some of his greatest days on Secret Invasion were when he was working alongside Clarke.

“We’d sit on the bench and talk about what it was like to grow up being actors because we both started quite young,” says Mendelsohn. “We were being nice to each other and that felt really magical in its own way.”

Clarke was thrilled by everything she was “given to play with” G’iah, in exploring the characters’ relationships. G’iah starts off on the opposite side of the Skrull uprising from her father, but it’s hinted that allegiances will shift over the course of the series.

Clarke admitted to seeking solace in film and theatre after her long tenure on Game of Thrones, a series that had a massive following and was her breakout role. Clarke teases that she has many more unannounced TV projects on the way.

For now, she is slated to star in two films, the biopic McCarthy as Jean Kerr, the wife of US Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, and in An Ideal Wife as Constance Lloyd, the Irish author and activist who was married to poet and playwright Oscar Wilde.

“I needed different characters,” says Clarke. “I needed different experiences. I just want to try to do as many different things as possible.”

Her projects since the conclusion of Game of Thrones include The Pod Generation, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, and she made her debut as a comic-book author with M.O.M.: Mother of Madness, an unabashedly feminist miniseries she co-wrote with Marguerite Bennett that launched in 2021.

What Clarke is seeking now is more opportunities to learn.

“I just want to keep broadening and reaching for the things that I haven’t had a chance to do before,” says Clarke. “With each new experience [and] every year that passes, you have more to play with as an actor.”

Clarke is prioritising opportunities to work with directors she admires.

This thoughtful consideration comes through as she discusses the real-world parallels to the political themes in Secret Invasion, the disparagement of the word “feminist”, the potential and perils of social media, and the misconception that acting in front of a green screen does not constitute “real” acting.

A recurring theme over the course of these varied topics is Clarke’s belief of the importance of being kind to one another. And her sincerity comes across in the energy she exudes.

“As long as you’re leading with kindness and compassion, you cannot go wrong,” says Clarke.

“There were times when I was really sad on that show, just simply because I was a young woman in her 20s,” says Clarke, who experienced two aneurysms as well as the loss of her father during the years she was working on Game of Thrones.

The show was also her first big job where she had to navigate the industry and sudden fame. “All of that happening while Game of Thrones was happening, it sometimes could be very confusing.”

But as time passes, Clarke says she is able to appreciate the remarkable experience for what it was.

Plus, “it’s not a shabby role to be associated with”, says Clarke. “Daenerys, I hope, is associated with a certain calibre of work, so lucky me that that’s the case. As long as people don’t ask me about nudity.”