Nikolaj Coster-Waldau talks Jaime’s Lannister’s most important moments, season 8

A lot of cast and crew members from Game of Thrones are doing press ahead of the 70th annual Emmy Awards, where the show is up for a whopping 22 statues. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is among the nominees, and recently spoke to the Los Angeles Times about all things Jaime Lannister.

Now that he’s filmed all of Jaime’s scenes, he can talk definitively about the defining moments for the character, and as far as he’s concerned, the top two are losing his hand and journeying to King’s Landing alongside Brienne of Tarth.

"What happened on that journey was very human. He was raised in an extreme family — no mother, a very dominant father; he’s been primed for a very specific life. Suddenly, he’s with this woman, and that does change him profoundly. He was a soldier. He was always the best at what he did. Suddenly that was taken away. He had to navigate this new world, where he couldn’t use strength, brute force, to get his way; he had to learn more from his brother how to deal with other people."

We can see Jaime thinking a little more like Tyrion in season 6, when he uses intimidation and negotiation to take back Riverrun for the Lannisters, rather than breaching the gates with an army.

Coster-Waldau agrees with the Times that Jaime’s journey is largely about empathy. After he learns to see Brienne, an enemy, as a person with hopes and dreams and great skill with a sword, it’s hard for him to go back to his old way of thinking about people. “Jaime has a couple of moments when he understands this woman before him, Brienne of Tarth, who on the surface is so different, he realizes, ‘She’s so like me.’ Which is why he tries to help her.” He likes how Jaime’s journey reflects issues in the real world:

"It’s so easy to demonize people you don’t know. You put on the news and you hear about refugees, all those stories … It’s sad, but it’s also human that it doesn’t affect you directly, you don’t get that emotional response. Then suddenly, you sit down and talk to someone who is in a situation, you meet someone, and you realize, “This is important.”"

Naturally, the Times asked Coster-Waldau a few question about season 8. Minor SPOILERS follow:

So some months back, there was a stretch of season 8 filming when a huge number of cast members gathered in Seville. We saw actors you’d expect to see together (e.g. Coster-Waldau and Gwendoline Christie) and others that left fans scratching their heads. (What in the world were Tom Wlaschiha (Jaqen H’ghar) and Faye Marsay (the Waif) doing there?) Coster-Waldau didn’t say what, if anything, this group filmed, but did confirm that they all had a lot of fun getting “stinking drunk” together after-hours. “Yes. That did happen,” he laughed. “We were shooting that in Seville, a beautiful city in Spain. A lot of us had only met at premieres or press junkets or the read-throughs. So to actually get to work together and hang out…”

"This season we got a lot of time together. The whole shoot was more or less in Belfast, so there were a lot of comings and goings. For all of us, it has been such an amazing experience. I guess it’s the same for any workplace; if you spend nine years together, you’re gonna get to know each other and care for each other. But, yes, we had a lot of fun in Spain, shooting that sequence, and also after shooting hours."

So that’s something else to look forward to in season 8: yet more characters meeting each other for the first time.

With Game of Thrones over, Coster-Waldau is looking at next steps; he’s going to appear in Brian De Palma’s Domino, would like to do more theater, and is going to do a longer-form tour of Greenland for Danish TV, which will include a stay at the the Thule Air Base where his father worked when he was a kid. But even though he’s done filming Game of Thrones, he’s not quite out of Westeros yet. “Even though we’ve had like 400 wrap parties and farewells, it still doesn’t really feel like it’s over. We’ve still got to go through the post-work, and then we’ve got to go to the premiere. Next fall, I think, is when the penny drops and you think, ‘Oh, I’m not going to Belfast this year.'”

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