King in the North: How 'Game of Thrones' inspired Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's latest film

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is in my living room. It’s a place he’s spent many Sunday nights since 2011. Today, however, instead of King’s Landing Westeros, he appears from a slightly rainy LA, dressed in a tight black tee and glasses. His hair is flopped to one side, eyes, welcoming, and the jawline that launched a thousand memes still very much chiselled. “I'm so glad that it's raining because it can drive me crazy when it's sunny and blue skies every day,” says the Danish actor, most famous for his role as Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones. “I find it disturbing.” He pauses in thought for a moment, then continues: “Maybe it is the Scandinavian in me. We need a bit of gloom, storm and darkness to keep us grounded.”

Today, however, there are figurative blue skies for him. He’s going to get his COVID-19 booster shot and he has a shiny new film to talk about. The first thing you notice about Coster-Waldau is that he’s as good looking as you’d imagine. In the past he’s been told he resembles Prince Charming from Shrek. I get the parallels. He is the definition of handsome. If you had to sketch ‘princely’, Coster-Waldau would materialise on your piece of paper. He’s also textbook charismatic; he’d likely appear with a bouquet of roses, reciting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29. But merely writing him off as a Lannister Knight, whose looks could turn the eye of his own sister, is not the sum of this actor’s whole, and his latest endeavour is proving just that.

Today, we’re discussing Against the Ice, an edge-of-your-seat Netflix vehicle that charts the true story of Danish explorers Captain Ejnar Mikkelsen and Iver Iversen, who, in 1910, set off on an expedition across the ice at tempting to disprove the United States’ claim to North Eastern Greenland. They fulfil the mission but return to Greenland’s Northeast Coast to discover their crew has left with the ship. The ice has frozen over for the winter, they have no boat, limited provisions and no way of getting home. Coster-Waldau co-wrote, produced and starred in the film, and it’s a pivotal move for his post-GoT career.

While he might cut a rom-com figure, Coster-Waldau's showreel includes Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven, and his breakout role in Danish thriller Nightwatch. I ask if he’ll ever give us a cameo on Bridgerton. He laughs, responding, "There has to be something at stake.” Against the Ice is the maiden project from the actor’s production company, III Kippers, which he launched with good friend and writer Joe Derrick. The inspiration for Coster-Waldau to step behind the camera came from watching writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss over the 10 years he filmed Game of Thrones.

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“They've been friends forever, and I just thought, ‘Wow, how nice it must be to work with your best friend’. It was creative and they had so much fun together. So that was kind of the inspiration for [Derrick and I],” Coster-Waldau says. So, it's not an accident that the first film the pair chose to write and produce is essentially a love letter to companionship. Mikkelsen and Iversen’s story is one of the most insane survival stories known to man. But it wasn’t the polar bear fights, lack of food, sub-zero temperatures and frozen waters that drew him to the project; it was the universal need for “human nutrition”, the idea that human’s need each other to survive.

The movie is an adaptation of a book, also called Against the Ice, by Ejnar Mikkelsen himself. Coster-Waldau received a copy f rom director Peter Flinth back in 2015, so it was always kind of shimmering in his mind. It was jam-packed with adventure, but there was one short description of a postcard that the men found that really piqued Coster-Waldau’s interest. “It’s only a small part of the book but the way he described [this postcard] was very moving,” he says. “Then I began looking at interviews with these two men over the years, and they always come back to that postcard. This was a big thing. And as you start imagining what it would be like being isolated for that long, [the film] started creating itself.”

The postcard he is talking about depicts a group of women. It’s not overtly sexy or sensual. It’s merely women standing outside the front of a college or hospital. But the postcard becomes a form of escapism for these men, who are complete opposites, as they try to pass over 800 days trapped in the arctic. It simultaneously gives them hope while sending them mad. “On a bigger picture that is really what life is about, right?” he muses. “If you look at our world today, you know, we still find the whole coping mentally as being something we don’t quite understand... Our brain is still a bit of a mystery to us. In the case [of this movie], these guys are like ‘We know what we need to do. We have what we need to survive, so why the f*** are we cracking?’”

It was friendship that ultimately saved Mikkelsen and Iversen - a lesson Coster-Waldau thinks we can all learn from. “The idea that we are all these tiny, little independent things that can do anything on our own is just not real. You need someone else. We're not alone,” he says. "To me, acting is about trying to understand what it means to be human... I do find human beings are very, very interesting because we're all so full of contradictions and there's always a gap between our beliefs and our actions. Whether we want to admit it or not.”

Against the Ice is cinematically beautiful. The turtlenecks, floor-skimming fur coats and knitted balaclavas worn by the film’s heroes are made entirely by hand, in Iceland. Wide angle shots of ice caps, submerging icebergs and rocky terrain play a supporting role in presenting the erratic emotions of the characters. The contrast between snow storms and sunshine is a stark reminder that mother nature can be both blindly stunning and instantly harsh – something that seems to delight Coster-Waldau.

Shooting in Greenland, while logistically tough (most days it was sub 28°C), was important for Coster-Waldau as his wife, former Miss Greenland Nukaaka Coster-Waldau and much of his family is from there. He tells the story of a storm so big he was lifted off the ground while holding the door of a truck, trying to get to the base cabin. “We had to evacuate the mountain...There's a van. And that has been smashed, all the windows have been smashed by flying rocks...that was nature telling us to get the f*** out,” he says. At one point Netflix sent him a note, suggesting he dial back on the snow and ice make-up in his beard. He responded, “This isn’t makeup.”

The fur, the sledges, the ice – swap a husky for a direwolf and a polar bear for a White Walker, and you could have been north of the Wall. I point out the similarities. Coster-Waldau thinks for a moment and says he actually hadn’t thought of that. Which gets us to the elephant in the room: Game of Thrones. It’s clear he is very proud and grateful for all the show has given him, but for him the attention is a little like déjà vu. He explains that his first big film, Nightwatch, was a huge success in Denmark and for the next 10 years it was all people talked about.

“As long as it's a positive thing I don't mind it [if it comes up in every interview]. I mean it would be worse if it was like, ‘So, that shit film you did’.” As he talks, there is an astute professionalism, and in-your-face movie starness, that makes you think Jaime Lannister will only be one part of his legacy. For Coster-Waldau, now 51, It was always acting – specifically, the escapism of acting. He grew up on a farm in Tybjerg, a small village in Denmark. He has been very public about his humble, often hard, upbringing – his father suffered from alcoholism.

But Coster-Waldau had a plan and stuck to it, becoming the youngest person, at the time, to ever go to the Danish National School of Performing Arts in Copenhagen. “I loved that I could spend hours every day just pretending I was someone else,” he says of how it all started. “Usually it was someone who won the World Championship in something that I’d made up. And at one point in the game, I’d always have to run because all the girls were chasing me.” Which leads me to ask him if he feels this pressure to always look good. To be the guy women swoon over.

The question catches him a little off guard. He mulls it over before answering, “I have a friend whose father retired and I spoke to him. I was like, ‘How is it?’. He responded ‘It's great. There's just one thing that really pisses me off. And it’s that now I have time to do all these things that I love to do, but my body is not quite willing’.” For Coster-Waldau it’s about keeping the body functioning at its best.

As has happened many times throughout our conversation, this thread leads to a deeper chat about mortality and being accepting of death. He then interrupts this philosophical deep dive with a sudden, “There was one time actually that I remember being extremely self-conscious...” A smile widens on his face. He explains that in his early 20s, his first big interview with a local Danish magazine coincided with a massive skin breakout. “[They are coming] home to my little apartment and I've made tea and I've bought some cookies. And I looked at myself in the mirror and there were spots everywhere. So I got this cream and I'm trying to cover it up. And I thought I did a good job. Months later you see the pictures and I just see these big blotches of white all over my face.”

And what a better image of humanity than the Kingslayer making tea and biscuits as he conceals acne on his forehead.