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Nikolaj Coster-Waldau on Jaime Lannister ( Robert Baratheon’s scheming brother-in-law – he does some bad stuff)
When you first read the script, did it strike you as something different?
I didn’t know about the books before, but I read the script for the pilot and thought it something I hadn’t done before because it’s such a huge cast, such an epic story, and I was curious to see how you could do it as a television show. Of course, I knew HBO’s done these large scale shows, but this seemed different, and it is different I think. Now I’ve read the books, of course, but they weren’t what I expected from fantasy, and I think that’s also what attracts a lot of people to these novels.
Was the prospect of working on an HBO show a big draw? They’ve made some blinding TV in the past.
Absolutely. The thing is they always have three-dimensional characters and they do it really,really well. Also what is great about George Martin’s book is that he doesn’t want to write black-or-white characters. This is a story about human beings caught in these games. And when I learned about happens to my character, Jaime, later on and why he started out, I thought he was a great character – you start out in episode one where he does something truly horrific, and you think how can anyone ever care for this character? And then later on you find out why he does what he does, and you kind of understand why he makes that choice.
It’s not Lord Of The Rings, is it?
I love Lord Of The Rings, of course – growing up reading those books was just fantastic – but there the bad are really, really bad, and the good people sometimes do bad things but they always do it because of the ring, it’s forced upon them – it’s not out of choice, and when the ring is taken away they become nice again. Here we don’t have a ring but we have good noble people doing really horrible things.
Have you read ahead to find out what happens to Jaime later on, or did you prefer to play him without knowing?
I think it’s like doing a play. It’s important to know so I can balance it, so I know I’m going to this place with the character so maybe I can increase that aspect of his character early on. But once you read the novels you wonder how you can condense this into ten hours, it’s so vast that they’ve done an amazing job getting into it.
Is your Jaime similar to the Jaime in the books?
He’s close to what I have in my mind, but I’m sure when you read the books you’ll see someone else. He’s the image I had when I read the books and the scripts, so clearly that will show. But bviously there are a lot of fans, and I’m sure some of them will disagree with that.
Did you have to do much physical training?
There was some training for the sword fighting. I have a big fight in episode five, I think, but it was just fun. I’ve done fighting before, but it was more like learning a dance I guess. And I had some additional horse riding lessons, but it was fairly straightforward.
You were in the excellent Virtuality pilot. Is that project dead?
I’m afraid so. That was a huge disappointment. To be honest I was beyond surprised when they said they weren’t picking it up because I thought it was brilliant, and had such huge potential. I understand they found it was too dense –very disappointing.
Game Of Thrones starts on Sky Atlantic on Monday 18 April at 9pm.
