The dark
knight
rises
T
here’s an old cliché that actors are always much
smaller in the flesh than they appear on screen.
Not Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. When I meet the
Game
of Thrones
actor at a press junket at London’s
Corinthia Hotel, he dwarfs the other actors milling
around – even the veteran English actor Charles Dance looks
petite next to the 1.88m giant, his broad shoulders bulging and his
muscled neck poking through a simple wool sweater.
Sporting standard-issue Scandi-in-Hollywood lank blond hair,
Coster-Waldau looks like someone you’d find in an erotic novel; he
seems custom-designed for swooning over. And while he’s been
compared to Prince Charming in
Shrek
,
you can’t quite imagine
Prince Charming sleeping with his sister or throwing a child out
of a tower window, two of the sins committed by “Kingslayer”, Ser
Jaime Lannister in just the first episode of
Game of Thrones
alone.
HBO’s epic fantasy series has wowed critics, won awards and
garnered an obsessive fanbase – all this despite its frequent nudity
and bone-shuddering violence. (
New York
magazine recently
voted the series’ fans the most devoted in popular culture, ahead
of followers of Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.) The adaptation of
George RR Martin’s notoriously long-winded novels, about a group
of families fighting for the throne of Westeros, based loosely on
England in the Dark Ages, comes off like Tolkien with anger issues
and a severe case of nymphomania.
But it goes beyond the usual teenage fanboy fantasy realm
because the characters are intriguing, even as they chop each
others’ heads off – it’s the
MadMen
of the Dark Ages, if you like –
and Coster-Waldau says there’s more to Lannister than meets the
eye. “You start off thinking, ‘Well, he’s the bad guy, he’s a horrible
person,’ but slowly, as the story progresses, you find out it’s a
little more complicated than that,” says the actor in his gravelly,
Danish-inflected English. “There is this whole side to him that you
had no idea about – a man who is very articulate, a guy capable
of empathy, who understands human nature, but is also a man of
action. If he has to go through you to get to where he wants to go,
he will, without any second thoughts.”
Though the 42-year-old has played his share of one-dimensional,
fantasy beefcakes, he made his name in 1994 with
Nattevagten
(
Nightwatch
),
a much-acclaimed Danish thriller about a student
who gets the nightshift at the morgue of a forensic department.
He has gone on to play the likes of a hard-drinking, immortal
Dutch detective (for 2008 Fox series
NewAmsterdam
);
a high-class
murderer in 2011’s sharp Norwegian thriller
Headhunters
,
based
on Jo Nesbø’s book; and, last year, a pair of identical twins in
Guillermo del Toro’s creepy horror film,
Mama
.
Along the way he’s made a steady transition fromHollywood
journeyman into something approaching stardom, helped by
smaller roles in Ridley Scott movies
Black Hawk Down
(2001)
»
His hard-hitting role in HBO series
Game of Thrones
has
helped push Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to the edge
of global stardom. And like his character, there’s more to him
than looking good in a suit of armour
W o r d s
⁄
R u t h S t y l e s
CUNEYT AKEROGLU
0 3 6 \
n
