Do we like Nikolaj Coster-Waldau?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up in his words or company, and years of climate and gender-equality work sit against one contested business dispute.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau grew up in the Danish village of Tybjerg, a librarian's son with two older sisters. He got into the Royal Danish Theatre School in 1989 as its youngest student, graduated in 1993, and broke through at home with the film Nightwatch in 1994.
The world knows him as Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones, which ran from 2011 and earned him an Empire Hero Award in 2015 as part of the cast. Since then he has gone for varied work, including the 2022 polar drama Against the Ice, which he also helped write and produce.
The one real stoush on his file is a money one. In 2018 an arbitrator ordered him to pay roughly US$1.75 million plus interest to his former manager, after he argued their agreements were a sham. The arbitrator found no credible evidence for that claim. His former manager's lawyer said he had declined to honour the ruling, and he appealed. I couldn't find how that ended, so call it a contested business fight rather than a character verdict.
On the harm test he comes up clean. He has been a UN Development Programme Goodwill Ambassador since 2016, pushing climate action and gender equality. He has said “There are no villains, as such” on climate, and argued for hope over doom. I found nothing from him either way on LGBTQ+ topics, so that part of the record is honestly thin, but nothing harmful turned up.
Nothing new on him lately that counts as news. The most recent stories are older or minor: a 2025 interview where he shrugged off the Thrones finale backlash, saying people are entitled to their opinion “but it's a television show”. In 2020 he swore at the people behind a hoax ad that falsely reported his death.
The good stuff is real. He refereed the first amateur women's World Cup in New York for the UN's Global Goals. For his 2017 birthday he ran a fundraiser for UN climate programmes. He has backed the Danish Red Cross since 2003, and he has worked on women's rights in Kenya and on a Danish actors' manifesto against sexism in film.