Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

El vigilante de la morgue

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau didn't start his career chasing dragons or Iron Thrones. In 1994 he starred in Nattevagten, and all of Denmark was gripped by his performance as a law student trapped in a morgue. That film was a national phenomenon that put him on the radar of European casting directors almost immediately.

And the phone started ringing from across the pond.

In 2001 Ridley Scott gave him a shot in Black Hawk Down. He appeared on screen for only a few minutes, but that was enough for the actor to pack his bags and settle in the United States. The following years were a string of supporting roles in productions that did not always find an audience at the box office.

He appeared in Kingdom of Heaven in 2005. But in Hollywood he was still that blond Nordic type with a square jaw, good for playing generic villains or anonymous soldiers. His salary back then was far from the astronomical figures he would see years later on cable television.

The Bet on Hatred

When he signed on to play Jaime Lannister in 2011, nobody knew the show would dominate pop culture for nearly a decade. Coster-Waldau had to deal with a character whose story arc begins with throwing a boy out of a window. The script required him to become the most hated man in fiction while he searched for the humanity beneath the golden armor.

Over the eight seasons of the series, the actor maintained a strict physical training routine. In the final seasons of the project, which ended in 2019, he was earning more than one million dollars per episode. But he always preferred to retreat to his home in Copenhagen with his family when filming wrapped on location in Belfast or Iceland.

Fame was never his main driving force.

In 2017 he starred in Shot Caller (known in Spain as Maestro del crimen). For this role he had to transform his physique and study the behavior of real inmates in California prisons. It was a small project where he showed that his real interest lay in broken characters and stories of extreme survival.

Production Control

In 2022 he wrote and starred in Stranded in the Arctic for Netflix. The shoot was grueling, filmed in real weather conditions, because the actor detests the use of green screens in adventure movies. The film was based on the Danish expedition of 1909, and he had to lose a drastic amount of weight to convey the hunger of the explorers.

He founded his own production company, Ill Kippers, to have full control over the stories he wanted to tell. That way he kept the industry from typecasting him forever as an action hero or medieval knight. His strategy was to alternate big-budget projects with auteur films shot in his native language.

In 2024 he shot the series King and Conqueror, playing William the Conqueror. The project had a massive budget to faithfully recreate the Battle of Hastings. Production moved to Iceland to take advantage of the natural light of the Nordic landscapes and avoid digital effects in the combat scenes.

The series wrapped post-production in the United Kingdom with a crew of more than two hundred technicians.