In July 2016, Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke was in Kentucky shooting a small independent film when she got a call saying her father was going into an operation he might not survive.
She spoke to him on the phone. He came through it. Then a second call told her to come home, and she arrived to find him in a coma. She sat with him for three days before the production said it could not keep filming without her, and her mother told her to go back. Two weeks remained on the shoot.
Clarke laid out the sequence on the How To Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast (@howtofailpod on Instagram) in an episode released May 13. Her father, Peter “Rick” Clarke, was a theatre sound engineer from Wolverhampton, England. He died on July 10, 2016, at 68, after a long run of complications from cancer. This July marked the 10th anniversary of his death.
She had been back in Kentucky a short time when the third call came in the middle of the night. She left without telling anyone.
The route home was Kentucky to New York, then New York to London. This was 2016, before in-flight Wi-Fi was standard, and she asked the crew whether the plane had a satellite phone.
“And I was like, okay, okay, so I’m just going to be sitting on this flight for like 10 hours, and I can’t contact anyone,” she told Day.
During the New York layover, her mother had reached her to say her father was asking her to hurry. Sitting in her seat with no way to call anyone, she ran a thought experiment about what could get inside a hospital. A bird was too big. Someone would notice a bird. A butterfly could do it.
“And so I imagine that I’m flying around the hospital and I’m like making sure that the doctors are going to do a really good job and I’m fluttering around my dad being like, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming home, I’m coming, like hold on, you’re going to be fine,’” she said.
She fell asleep. In the dream she was still in her airline seat, and her father’s hospital bed was next to her. He turned and said, “I just came to say goodbye.”
The plane landed. Her mother texted her not to rush.
“So I knew that he’d passed, and he passed at the time that I was having the dream,” Clarke said.
She spent time with his body. Then she went back to the house with her mother and brother, who had been at the hospital for days, and they opened the door.
“There’s butterflies flying around the room,” she said. “So now I just see my dad in butterflies everywhere.”
What Clarke described has been studied extensively and has several competing names, including post-bereavement hallucination and sensory experiences of the deceased.
A 2015 review in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that between 30% and 60% of widowed people report sensing the person they lost, most often as a felt presence rather than a vision or a voice. The foundational study came from a Welsh general practitioner named W. Dewi Rees, who in 1971 interviewed 293 widows and widowers in his rural practice and found that close to half of them had experienced it. He concluded that it was a normal part of grieving rather than a symptom of anything. Later research has largely agreed.
Clarke does not frame it as a psychological event. When Day noted that human beings are made of atoms and called this the place where science and spirituality meet, Clarke said her father was both.
“He deeply believed in black holes,” she said. “And I’m like, that’s where you are.”
He was cremated, which she takes to mean he went back into the world. “He is everywhere,” she said. “He’s absolutely everywhere.”
