Winter could have been over for Nikolaj Coster-Waldau when Game of Thrones ended in 2019, but the Danish star put himself back in the snow for his latest adventure, Against the Ice.
The film, which is now available on Netflix, follows the wild saga of Denmark’s Ejnar Mikkelsen, a captain, explorer and author who set out in 1909 to recover the maps and journals of a failed Artic expedition a few years prior, reported The Associated Press.
At stake was a dispute over Northeast Greenland, which the United States had claimed and which the Dutch were attempting to invalidate by proving that Greenland was one island.
Mikkelsen had only his sled dogs and one inexperienced mate at his side for the mission, which kept getting more complicated.
It’s a project that has been with Coster-Waldau for almost a decade. Director Peter Flinth, a friend from school, sent Mikkelsen’s book Two Against the Ice to consider.
Flinth had heard about it from the Queen of Denmark Margrethe II who had mentioned to Flinth that it might make a good movie. Coster-Waldau agreed and not only does he star: He also co-wrote the script with his longtime friend and collaborator Joe Derrick.
“It was a long journey. It was a complicated book to adapt,” Coster-Waldau, 51, said in a recent interview.
“I’ve always loved survival stories, explorers who go to unknown places. It’s exciting. But what really caught me here was it was an unusual combination,” he said.
Coster-Waldau added: “Normally both men would have had the same ambitions and hopes but here one of them was a famous explorer and the other was literally just a mechanic. This is what actually saves them, that they were so different.”
Game of Thrones took up a lot of air in the culture when it was on, but Coster-Waldau has always been aware that there is life outside of Jaime Lannister.
It was on a trip where he found he’d lost out on the lead role in John Carter that he found out he’d booked a pilot about dragons. Though it might not have seemed like it at the time, it turned out to have been the best-case scenario.
Game of Thrones provided stability and renown and made him a household name in the US, but even during the eight-season run, he was always doing other projects.
“I love acting. I love getting jobs as an actor,” he said. “But what we’re doing now is so much fun and so interesting, just to get in from the beginning of a story and help create it.”
