Jet lag can do strange things to a person. Some of us fall asleep and end up face down in our dinners. Others fall into a kind of manic existentialism. And this is the state in which I find Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. We are ostensibly meeting to talk about his role as William of Normandy in the BBC’s epic historical drama King & Conqueror, and of course Game of Thrones, the show that propelled him to international heartthrob status. But instead, Coster-Waldau seems to be in the mood for heftier topics. Social media, AI, robots, wars, weapons, intimacy coordinators, the inevitability of ageing – all are on the table. “OK, this is not about William the Conqueror,” he admits at one point. “F***. Give me a question. Get me back on track!”
The 55-year-old Danish actor is speaking from a hotel room in New Jersey, his slate-grey shirt unbuttoned at the top and his arm slung over the sofa. His accent is a heady mix of Danish and American, with the odd lengthy British vowel thrown in. The hair is sandy; the jaw could cut steel. The man may be knackered, but he looks sharp as ever.
Coster-Waldau has landed in the US, for a project he can’t disclose, after several weeks in India and a flyby visit to London – hence the jet lag. And it’s no wonder he’s feeling existential: in India, he was filming the forthcoming second season of his Bloomberg TV documentary An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet, in which he travels the world to meet people who are striving for a more sustainable future. In London, he was at the premiere of King & Conqueror, a lavish, fictionalised retelling of the lead-up to the battle of 1066, a war that changed the very fabric of England and that has made him reflect on today’s conflicts and the behaviour of our world leaders. It’s all pretty heavy stuff.
Fans of Game of Thrones – and Coster-Waldau’s despicable but somehow irresistible “Kingslayer”, Jaime Lannister – will find a lot to like in the new drama. A ruddy and windswept Dane? Tick. The clanking of swords and shields? Tick. Galloping horses? Tick. But, superficial pleasures aside, the show is about a bloody and merciless fight between two men – Coster-Waldau’s William and James Norton’s Harold of Wessex – for the English throne.
“You look at these guys and their immense ambition,” says Coster-Waldau, “and of course you see today, all these men who want to rule the world, and all these wars happening. The irony, of course, is that this show is set 1,000 years ago, and nothing seems to have changed. We have rulers who manipulate, and very quickly they invoke some kind of religious supernatural power, on their behalf, to control people, and then people go along with it.” Leaders, he says, “create all these f***ing narratives” about how their war is “just”. We do learn from history, he believes, but depressingly, “we also repeat a lot of things”.
Coster-Waldau spent most of his forties filming Game of Thrones, playing the kind of gruff, charismatic alpha that casting directors dream of; now in his fifties, he is pleased to confirm that performing fight scenes comes just as easily as it did a decade ago. “Physical stuff like that is always fun and a little painful,” he says, seeming genuinely unbothered. “Knock on wood, I don’t feel a lack of energy.” But God forbid we dwell on the show for too long. Coster-Waldau wants to dig deeper, to talk about how “f***ing everyone is so afraid of getting older”. (When he swears, which is a lot, it’s not out of anger – it’s more of a verbal tick; a replacement for “umm” or “like”.) For men, he says, there’s an obsession with hormones and increasing testosterone to mask the physical effects of ageing, but people can up their levels too much. “So you get all these 60-year-old guys suddenly all jacked up and full of energy, and then the next week they drop dead from heart attacks!”
He puts society’s preoccupation with reversing the ageing process down to our fear of death. “That’s why we have an industry of things you can buy to pretend it doesn’t exist, whether it’s facial treatments, hormone injections or plastic surgery. But it’s a waste of time trying to inject too much energy into that fear, because,” he shrugs, “there still hasn’t been anyone who’s not ended up dead.”
Through laughter, Coster-Waldau details how shocked he was to discover that even William the Conqueror, someone of such high standing and so feared throughout Europe, had a “crazy demise”. “He wanted to be buried in Cannes, in France,” he says, “and they had this stone sarcophagus ready for him, but he was quite large at the end of his life, and it took time to get his body there. In the French heat, he became kind of like a whale, with the gases. They had to poke a hole in him, so he kind of… exploded.” He shakes his head. “There’s something really funny about it – at the end of the day, he’s just a big ball of rotten flesh.” He apologises for the gory tangent. “I’m going down all these different rabbit holes!”
He’s right about the rabbit holes. Next, we go from a conversation about William the Conqueror’s son and Coster-Waldau’s relationship with his own children to the perils of social media and AI. He shares two daughters, now in their twenties, with his wife, Greenlandic actor Nukâka, to whom he’s been married since 1997; they met while recording a radio show. He admits that, for many years of fatherhood, he struggled to understand “how deeply integral social media is to the lives of young people”. These days, he has lots of discussions with his daughters about it, and how the online world offers “a projection of who you are”, rather than the reality.
He worries, too, about the creeping dominance of AI in our lives. “For some reason, with AI, we’re being told that there is no choice, and only one way forward,” he says, “and it has to be as fast as we can, in case someone else gets there first. But what are we aiming for?” He finds it “crazy” that politicians seem to be sleepwalking their way into an AI apocalypse, investing huge sums into these companies, without stopping to think about the dangers they could pose. “Our politicians are just going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’” – he does a frantic impression of a nodding dog – “because we are told, ‘The Chinese are coming, the Russians are coming, the Americans are coming!’” He is doing dramatic panting now, looking out the window as if to steel himself against an enemy. “And in the meantime, you just see the stock prices of these companies going shooooop!” he says, gesturing to the ceiling.
It’s easy to picture Coster-Waldau, even on a full night’s sleep, having animated conversations like this at the family dinner table. Usually, the four of them are based in Copenhagen, 50 miles from Tybjerg, the tiny farming village where he grew up. His mother was a librarian, his father an administrator who worked in Greenland and struggled with alcoholism. His parents split up and got back together several times when he was little, and Coster-Waldau threw himself into acting to distract himself from events at home. In the early Nineties, he attended the Danish National School of Performing Arts; the year after he left, his breakthrough role arrived with the 1994 Danish horror film Nightwatch – he played a watchman at a morgue, and the film was so successful it later got an English remake led by Ewan McGregor. In 2001, he made his Hollywood debut with a minor role as an army officer in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, and ever since has split his time between Danish and international productions, from romcoms (Wimbledon, The Other Woman) to thrillers (Headhunters, Shot Caller) and dramas (A Thousand Times Goodnight).
How are you ever gonna make an end [to ‘Game of Thrones’] that’s gonna satisfy everyone? That’s a very difficult thing
But it was in 2011, when he was cast as Jaime Lannister in the biggest TV show of all time, that everything changed. Jaime – who, lest we forget, pushed a child out of a window to cover up his affair with his twin sister Cersei – was one of the few characters to survive to the end of Game of Thrones’s eight-season run, meaning Coster-Waldau spent four months a year, for almost a decade, filming the show. By the time it ended in 2019, he had become one of the highest-paid actors on television, reportedly earning $1.1m per episode. In a speech given after Coster-Waldau filmed his last ever scene, the drama’s co-creator, David Benioff, paid tribute to “the best looking man in Westeros”, confessing “we’ll never be able to afford him again”.
The show made him preposterously recognisable. It earned him fans so zealous they have tattoos of his face on their bodies. But in Copenhagen, he gets a break from all the attention. “Nobody cares,” he chuckles. “If I go to places with a lot of tourists, I might be recognised, but it’s such a small country, and I’ve been around for a long time, so I guess people are just used to me.”
“Just tits and dragons,” is how actor Ian McShane once described the show. Despite all the sex, there were no intimacy coordinators on the set, and Coster-Waldau says he’d have liked to have them around earlier in his career. Particularly on Nightwatch, where he had an unfortunate moment during rehearsals for an intimate scene. “I had come right out of drama school,” he says, “and I had no idea. So I got on the bed and I was just naked. I thought I was supposed to be naked and nobody told me anything. I’m just lying there, waiting for the actress to come. The whole thing was ridiculous. I was covering myself with my hands, feeling really embarrassed. It’s funny to think back, but at the time I was very uncomfortable.” He is all for intimacy coordinators, especially because both his daughters have started acting. “It’s a very good thing to have someone make sure that everything is respectful.”
It’s impossible to talk about Game of Thrones without acknowledging how divisive that season eight finale was. Among many other criticisms, fans felt that it was rushed, and that Jaime and Cersei’s deaths were anticlimactic. A petition for season eight to be remade got 1.8 million signatures. Six years on, Coster-Waldau remains unfazed. “It was expected,” he says. “How are you ever gonna make an end that’s gonna satisfy everyone? That’s a very difficult thing. I absolutely think people are entitled to whatever opinion they have, but it’s a television show. Someone told you a story and you didn’t like the ending. It’s really annoying, but…” He trails off, shrugging.
After all, it’s just an old TV show about tits and dragons, and Coster-Waldau has much bigger issues on his mind – putting the world to rights, and finding a soft surface to sleep on.
‘King & Conqueror’ premieres on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday 24 August
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