Return of the Kingslayer: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is Back in Action for Game of Thrones’ 7th Season

Well, duh. We try one last time to beg for some juicy GOT gossip, but Coster-Waldau just folds his hands and smiles pleasantly. “Jaime won’t kill Cersei in Episode 1,” he says sweetly. Gee, thanks. Spoken like a true Lannister.

The best part about Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s latest projects: none involve swords, prosthetics or body armor.

It’s not like chain metal has been his only costume throughout his career. In fact, aside from his stage debut as Laertes in Hamlet, a small role in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven and the 2016 fantasy flick Gods of Egypt, Coster-Waldau has been able to wear proper clothing in every other film, thank you very much.

His métier kicked off in the early ’90s with the Danish film Nightwatch, followed shortly after by his British debut in the 1997 drama Bent, alongside Jude Law, Clive Owen and Mick Jagger. But it wasn’t until 2001 that he began to work in the States, making his debut in Ridley Scott’s war film Black Hawk Down as Medal of Honor recipient Gary Gordon. Ensuing projects included Michael Apted’s Enigma, the Quentin Tarantino-produced My Name is Modesty (based on the “Modesty Blaise” comic strip), Richard Loncraine’s tennis rom- com Wimbledon with Kirsten Dunst and the thriller Firewall with Harrison Ford. He briefly toyed with another TV series, Fox’s short- lived New Amsterdam, before accepting the role in Game of Thrones. Then, while on hiatus from playing Jaime Lannister, he filmed the 2013 horror film Mama alongside Jessica Chastain, Oblivion with Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman and the romantic comedy The Other Woman with Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann and Kate Upton.

It was because of Thrones, however, that these more substantial roles became possible. And while he’s grateful for all of the opportunities the series has brought him, sometimes—just sometimes—he’d like to talk about something else for a while.

“I enjoy my job, including talking about it, but almost all of the time you can’t really talk about what’s happening on Game of Thrones. And then, once it’s done, people want to know what happens next,” he laments. That said, there’s a silver lining: the show is so popular that it affords him the opportunity to talk about smaller, more independent work. “We’re lucky [to have it] shine the spotlight on other projects.”

Such is the case with Small Crimes, a crime drama that premiered at SXSW in April about a disgraced former cop, who returns home fresh off a prison sentence for attempted murder, looking for redemption but finding himself trapped in the horror he left behind. He also starred in the Saban Films-produced Shot Caller, which premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June and will be widely distributed in theaters on August 18. In the gritty drama co-starring Lake Bell and Benjamin Bratt, set in Southern California, Coster-Waldau plays a newly released prison gangster forced to orchestrate a major crime with a rival gang.

It isn’t that he has a penchant for playing criminals—Coster-Waldau is simply drawn to the flaws, the story, the idea that no human being is one thing and no situation black and white. “The whole good/bad thing is boring,” he confides. “I don’t think that you can play anyone using those parameters because they’re so shallow. I think that it’s that old trip about ‘one man’s freedom fire is another’s terrorist.’ You have to go a little deeper than that to understand motivations and reasons for behaving the way [that kind of ] character does.”

This is what drew him to play Jacob Harlon in Shot Caller. “This is… a good guy. He goes out one night and has a couple of glasses of wine and he gets in the car in L.A. He crashes the car, commits involuntary manslaughter and he’s put away. Then he becomes a criminal inside, and [the film] is about how being exposed to that kind of extreme cir- cumstance affects us. I think that any of us are capable of so many great things, but we’re also capable of a lot of bad things.”

And now we also understand why he couldn’t resist his GOT role— playing a quintessentially flawed human being who finds redemption in loyalty and compassion. “I think that, in many ways for me, Jaime Lannister is a hero and he’s a good guy. He tries to do good, but there are scenes where his actions are horrific and he causes a lot of pain to a lot of people. But that’s interesting. I don’t think I know anyone who is just good or just bad.” He adds, “It has to be written really well. You can only do so much as an actor—if it’s not in the page, it’s not going to work. [Jaime is] not a saint, that’s for sure.”

Playing Jaime Lannister—a sinner with layers—is one thing, but even Coster-Waldau has his limits. “I’ve found things that I couldn’t do,” he admits, acknowledging that he turned down a role in an upcoming film that had very distinctive whiffs of former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse scandal of the 1970s. “I was offered a script that was very similar to that case to play a version of him, and I just couldn’t do that. Pedophiles, stuff like that, I cannot do. Even though I acknowledge that those stories are also important to be told, I cannot be the one to do them.”

So he’ll stick to interesting fare that he doesn’t find somewhat off- putting, like his newly announced role in Brian De Palma’s latest thrill- er, Domino. In the film, which starts shooting this summer, Coster- Waldau plays a Danish cop who goes rogue with the help of his fellow officer (former Mad Men star Christina Hendricks) to track down the person who killed his partner while Europe is under a terrorist attack. Unbeknownst to the attractive twosome, the assailant they’re chasing is working for a CIA operative who’s trailing an ISIS cell responsible for the attacks.

If it sounds like he’s gravitating more towards film than television, you’d be right. But after eight years on the same series, who could blame him? “I want to do movies,” he says. “I’ve started developing and producing; I find that really interesting. Also, these things take so much time—sometimes it’s just easier to be more involved once you’ve dedicated yourself to something for six months only. I can’t imagine doing [another] long-running series for a while, but who knows?”

We can only guess why Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is so unaffected. Is it because he grew up in the Danish countryside? Is it because he doesn’t live in Hollywood and, in fact, didn’t start his career in America until later in life? We can’t say for sure. What we do know: despite being the youngest actor to enter the Danish National School of Theatre and Contemporary Dance, and despite his success on Game of Thrones, the actor remains utterly and completely down-to-earth.

It’s rare to find someone like this who’s part of the successful Hollywood wheel. When we say as much, he waves us away. “Of course I have an ego,” he disagrees. “As soon as I sit down here and accept that it’s interesting for you to spend time to talk to me about me, then already here I have an ego!” he says with a laugh.

But despite the millions he’s made, his biggest extravagances are paying off his mortgage, buying a small house in Greenland (where his wife, Nukâka, a Greenlandic actress and singer, and father-in-law Josef Motzfeldt, a member of the Parliament of Greenland and former leader of the Community of the People party, are from), and maybe buying a mountain bike.

And while he’s happy to be in Los Angeles—a necessary obligation for most actors—he’s even happier to leave it. “The whole ego thing [in L.A.] is absolutely out of control. I look at that whole celebrity culture that they have out there, and it’s almost this pocket in the rest of the world where you go inside Hollywood and suddenly the crazy becomes normal. You go out there and you go to these [celebrity] things and all the surface surrounding is so bizarre, but it’s a normal thing. Sometimes you go, ‘Oh my God, this is so weird and so crazy. Why isn’t anyone laughing about this? Why are they taking this so seriously?’ Thankfully, I can come in and just taste it and I’ll leave again.”

At least he has the right attitude, stating, “I just try to have fun when I go to any of these things. But you observe it and learn something from it and it’s fun.”

You’ll definitely never find him in a Bel Air mega-mansion with a staff waiting on him hand and foot. He just doesn’t understand it. “People will have a chef with them, or that whole thing about having staff do stuff for you all the time. I always think, ‘What do you do then? If you have someone to cook for you, someone to clean for you, someone to care of your kids, someone to drive you, then what do you do?’ There’s nothing to do.”

Possibly because of this anti-silver spoon mentality, Coster-Waldau takes ‘DIY’ to a whole new level. When he gets home to Kongens Lyngby, where he lives with his wife and two teenage daughters, he’ll actually be hand-fixing his 16-year-old’s iPhone. “I’ve ordered online a new button and a new battery and a charger, so I’m changing that. I’m so excited to save so much money doing it myself. I’m spending like, $28 to get all the parts. I like to repair stuff.”

And while we would describe the actor as ‘refreshing,’ he is very clear about how he’d describe himself: “The fact that I’m a father is very important, and I’m a husband. And an optimist… I’m more often in a good mood than not. I think that I don’t get too down about the hardships of life. We all go through the same shit, we all have sickness in our lives and lose people we love, and we all have our hearts broken in one way or the other, whether [from] relationships or it could also be friends you fall out with. All of these situations happen to all of us, but I think the way you handle those situations says a lot about your character.” He pauses, and flashes that charming, normal-guy-hidden-in-a- movie-star smile and says, “I guess I kind of believe in happy endings.”