Survival story finds Game of Thrones star in his element – as a creator
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.
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 sledge 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 film.
Coster-Waldau agreed and not only does he star: he also co-wrote the script with his long-time friend and collaborator Joe Derrick.
“It was a long journey. It was a complicated book to adapt.” says Coster-Waldau, 51. “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.
“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.”
They shot on location on glaciers mostly in Iceland, some in Greenland, and relied minimally on CGI. In casting Joe Cole as Mikkelsen’s very green companion Iver Iversen, the filmmakers warned the actor that the conditions would be harsh and comforts minimal.
At one point, Netflix sent back a note on footage they had seen worried that they were overdoing it with the snow and ice on his beard, not realising that it was neither make-up nor effects – it was real. Funnily enough, CosterWaldau says his fur period costumes proved warmer than the modern Arctic gear that much of the crew was wearing.
Friendship has been a theme of the whole project, both in the story itself and in the fact that Coster-Waldau and Derrick made their creative partnership official a few years ago, founding Ill Kippers Productions. It was actually seeing Game of Thrones executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss work together that inspired him to start the company.
“I was like, wow, imagine going to work every day with your best friend,” he says.
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 Jaime Lannister. He started on the HBO show at age 41, after he was a major star in his country and had had some big breaks and disappointments in Hollywood.
It was on a trip where he found that he had lost out on the lead role in John Carter that he found out he had booked a pilot about dragons. Though it might not have seemed like it at the time, it turned out to have been the bestcase 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. The only difference now is that he doesn’t have a few months of his year blocked off to go film in Belfast and he has a little more time to write.
“I love acting. I love getting jobs as an actor,” he says. “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.”
Next up he has a multi-part Audible drama that Derrick wrote and he performs in that will debut sometime in May. He describes it as an “old-school radio play”. But first, he is enjoying the moment with Against the Ice.
“There is just such a sense of accomplishment and pride in this movie, because it was not an easy one to make,” he says. “Our ambitions were so high.”
It is so much fun and so interesting to get in from the beginning of a story and help create it
NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU, ACTOR-WRITER