“It’s remarkable that I am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions,” Game of Thrones alumna Emilia Clarke said

Emilia Clarke says she’s missing “quite a bit” of her brain after suffering two aneurysms in 2011 and 2013.

“The amount of my brain that is no longer usable — it’s remarkable that I am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions,” the Game of Thrones alum, 35, told BBC One’s Sunday Morning over the weekend. “I am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that.”

“There’s quite a bit missing!” she added on the news program. “Which always makes me laugh. “Because strokes, basically, as soon as any part of your brain doesn’t get blood for a second, it’s gone. And so the blood finds a different route to get around but then whatever bit it’s missing is therefore gone.”

Clarke experienced her first aneurysm, which caused a stroke and a subarachnoid hemorrhage, soon after wrapping up filming on the first season of Game of Thrones in 2011.

That led to brain surgery, and two weeks later, Clarke couldn’t remember her name. “I was suffering from a condition called aphasia, a consequence of the trauma my brain had suffered,” she said in a 2019 essay for The New Yorker (aphasia is the same diagnosis actor Bruce Willis disclosed he had received earlier this year).

“In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug,” she wrote. “I asked the medical staff to let me die. My job — my entire dream of what my life would be — centered on language, on communication. Without that, I was lost.”

Thankfully for Clarke, her aphasia was temporary. “I was sent back to the I.C.U. and, after about a week, the aphasia passed,” she wrote. “I was able to speak.”

In 2013, Clarke underwent a second surgery to address another aneurysm that was about to “pop.” Though the surgery was traumatic, with complications, the actress has been able to return to work. She’s currently starring in The Seagull at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre.

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Clarke has also created a charity, SameYou, to raise money for people recovering from brain injuries and strokes.

The life-altering medical issues also changed the actress’s opinion on beauty, realizing that true beauty comes from within, as she told PEOPLE last year.

“The happy moments and being happy is what you’re going to see on your deathbed. You’re not going to remember the times when you took that super-cute selfie,” she said.