Nikolaj Coster-Waldau portrays the brutal Jaime Lannister in HBO’s series Game of Thrones but he tells the HFPA it’s really all out of love.
You wouldn’t exactly call Jaime Lannister a role model and the 44-year-old Danish actor who portrays him in the hit series Game of Thrones agrees with that. But he likes to dig a little deeper and at least find a slightly noble motivation behind his character’s deeds.
“Some of his actions have been so brutal,” Nikolaj Coster-Waldau said in a recent interview in Los Angeles. “But it was always interesting to me that you do something out of love – which is something that’s beautiful – but what you do is really just horrible, brutal, deadly. But if you look at our world, a lot of times we do stuff with the best intentions and that’s the whole question of does the end justify the means?”
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s initial appearance on the show, when it all started on HBO back in April of 2011 certainly was rather shocking: A love scene with his sister Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey). At the end of the show’s fourth season, he has another intense sex scene with her – but this time in front of the corpse of their deceased father, and rough to an extent that some might interpret it as rape. But again, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau focuses on his character’s positive development. “I think it’s still love of his family,” he says about his character’s motivation. “Since Season 3 he met Brienne, he lost his hand and he’s kind of had to re-find himself in this new situation and also growing older and having to take responsibility not just for himself but for his family. He’s lived the life in secrets and now maybe he realizes that this didn’t go too well.” In the fourth season he did open up to Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) about his big secret of why he became a king slayer. “That kind of allowed him to be truthful,” says Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. “And I think that’s a journey he’s on about just letting go of all the crap and just stand up and be the man he is, like his dad said early on. There was a scene with Tyrion, the first scene they had, when he said: ‘I want you to become the man you were always meant to be’. I think he’s trying and he’s on that – on that path.”
He finished season four with what seemed the best intentions, wanting to save his brother and eventually doing so. It turned into a disaster because he ended up losing his father. At the beginning of season five we find he is still in mourning but embarking on new travels and a new adventure.
But when it comes right down to it Coster-Waldau does have his misgivings about Jamie as a man: “He would never be my best friend!” he told us. Part of the thrill of Game of Thrones is that you never know who will die next. Unless you read the books by George R.R. Martin, which by the way might not be a give-away either, because show-runner David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have made (even bloodier) changes to their version.
“I’m curious,” says Nikolaj Coster-Waldau about the end of his character in the show. “I’m really curious to see because it’s a great story and you know we’re coming to the end of telling this story and so you have a feeling that not that many people will be left standing by the end.”
TC