Nikolaj Coster-Waldau talks about THAT Season 4 scene
With only four more weeks until the debut of Season 5, GQ is getting into the Game of Thrones business by featuring not one, but two of the most handsome men in the show. Both Kit Harington and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau will be taking off their armor in the Australian edition of the March/April issue and trading it for “some GQ-approved menswear,” according to the blurb.
They’ll also be talking about the show, or at least, trying to talk about it without giving anything away. News.com.au has a preview of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s interview, where he opens up about that controversial scene in Season 4. (You know the one. With Cersei. While Joffrey was lying in state.)
“I was sure there was going to be a lot of talk about it,” [says} Nikolaj Coster-Waldau,“But I assumed it was going to be about the fact we had sex in front of our dead son.”
See what else Coster-Waldau had to say, below.
It became more about, ‘Was it rape?’, which shocked us. I sound naive, but I never saw it like that.
“It was as if Game of Thrones was now social commentary. I was like, ‘Really?’, and suddenly it was pro-rape. I’m not going to talk about that because it’s a sensitive topic. But it’s a television show with a storyline featuring two people who have had a dysfunctional relationship. It’s clearly not healthy for either of them — that scene being just another example. And suddenly a scene in a television show is used as an argument in an overall political discussion.”
As we all remember, that was a very hard scene to sit through. I know for me, I had always read that scene as consensual in the books, but that’s because it’s presented from Jaime’s PoV. It wasn’t until after I saw the scene from a third person perspective on TV that I went back and reread and realized how muddy it really was.
But as Coster-Waldau reminds us, though Jaime is a sympathetic character, he’s also one that threw a child out a tower window the first episode we met him.
“What if killing this kid was the only way to save your life and those of your sister and three children?” Coster-Waldau says. Probably more people than not would say, ‘Yeah, I would kill someone else’s child to save my own child, even if that other child was innocent.’ These are the difficult decisions people make, and they’re worth examining. We all know the feeling of meeting someone and then being surprised and almost ashamed because we find out this person was nothing like what we’d expected. People can relate to that in Jaime.”
“I really do believe that it’s what the writers did with these characters that makes it interesting. They’re also good at holding on to that element of ‘no one’s safe’, which is something George R.R. Martin wanted to have in his books. Just because it’s a main character, that doesn’t guarantee survival.”
They’re certainly promising that no one is safe in Season 5… We’ll see if Coster-Waldau has more to say when this issue hits stands in the weeks ahead.
Spoiler Alert!
Please take care to tag spoilers in your comments by wrapping them with <spoiler></spoiler>. Spoilers in comments are hidden by a gray overlay. To reveal, simply hover or tap on the text!