Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is an actor, born 1970.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was born in Rudkobing, Denmark, in 1970, graduated from the Danish National School of Performing Arts in 1993, and broke through the following year in Nightwatch, a Danish thriller remade in Hollywood almost immediately. His American debut came in Black Hawk Down in 2001, playing Gary Gordon, a soldier awarded the Medal of Honor. Then came a decade of near misses: a cancelled Fox detective series, a science fiction pilot that ended up airing as a one-off television film, supporting slots in Kingdom of Heaven and Wimbledon.
Game of Thrones fixed that, and it is worth being precise about why he was good in it. Jaime Lannister is introduced as a smirking villain and then spends years being rewritten by the show into something closer to tragedy, so the performance had to work both ways at once: the arrogance had to be real enough to hate and thin enough to crack. Coster-Waldau plays charm as a defence mechanism, which is the only reading that makes the character's later seasons coherent. It brought him two Emmy nominations.
The film career around it has been uneven and he appears to know it. Gods of Egypt and The Other Woman are studio jobs. Shot Caller is the one worth defending, a genuinely grim prison drama in which a white-collar man learns to be a criminal, and the Scandinavian thriller Headhunters is the sharpest film he has been in. He also starred in Against the Ice, an Arctic survival story drawn from a Danish expedition. Outside acting he works as a UNDP Goodwill Ambassador on climate and gender equality.
Movies (30)
- Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
- Black Hawk Down (2001)
- The Flash (2023)
- Oblivion (2013)
- Gods of Egypt (2016)
- Shot Caller (2017)
- Mama (2013)
- The Other Woman (2014)
- God Is a Bullet (2023)
- Firewall (2006)
- The Silencing (2020)
- Game of Thrones: The Last Watch (2019)
- Game of Thrones - Conquest & Rebellion: An Animated History of the Seven Kingdoms (2017)
- Against the Ice (2022)
- Enigma (2001)
- Wimbledon (2004)
- Domino (2019)
- Game of Thrones The IMAX Experience (2015)
- Headhunters (2011)
- Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever (2023)
- Blackthorn (2011)
- Bent (1997)
- Small Crimes (2017)
- The Baker (2007)
- Virtuality (2009)
- Exit Plan (2019)
- A Second Chance (2014)
- Nightwatch (1994)
- My Name Is Modesty: A Modesty Blaise Adventure (2004)
- Stealing Rembrandt (2003)
TV (5)
Where to start with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
There is one obvious answer, Game of Thrones, and the useful advice attached to it is to keep going past the point where you think you have decided about his character, because everything interesting he does happens in the back half.
Once that is done, Headhunters is the film to reach for: a fast, nasty Scandinavian thriller in which he is the predator rather than the wounded man, and easily the most enjoyable thing he has been in. Shot Caller is heavier and better acted. Nightwatch is the Danish original that started him and still functions as horror. Black Hawk Down is a small, straight, unshowy war role. Mama and Against the Ice are for completists, the first a decent haunted-house picture, the second a slow survival story he clearly cared about.
Jaime Lannister and the franchise years
Eight years of Jaime, a character the show asked him to make sympathetic and then unmade in the final season, plus the American genre films the fame bought. Mama is the best of those, a Guillermo del Toro production with real atmosphere.
The Danish and Nordic work
The Scandinavian films are consistently the better work and almost nobody outside the region has seen them. Nightwatch made him at twenty-three and he came back for a sequel thirty years later. Headhunters is the Jo Nesbo adaptation and is genuinely funny.
The English-language films
Ridley Scott used him twice early, and the later choices get more interesting as the profile drops. Shot Caller is a prison drama that is much better than it sounds, and Against the Ice is the Arctic survival film he produced himself.