As Jaime Lannister, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays the most complex character in Game of Thrones. With the world’s most popular TV show entering its final season, MH talks to the man who brings humanity to an incestuous cutthroat.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau spent about a decade playing Jaime Lannister, one of the central roles in the wildly successful HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones. But that’s no longer his job. You’d assume he’d have a few thoughts about what it means to go through such an experience and have it all end – and he does, in his pragmatic, even-keeled, presumably classically Danish way. Right now, however, he is trying to decide whether to accept a mushroom coffee.
“Is it going to get me high?” he asks.
“No,” says the man proffering the coffee, almost apologetically. He’s the manager of an ax-throwing range in North Hollywood; Coster-Waldau and I have just hurled hammer-sized axes at a target for about as long as it’s possible to do so for fun. There’s a pending alcohol license application on the door, but all CosterWaldau wants right now is a hot drink, and the place can only offer an adaptogen-rich brew of ground-up cordyceps mushrooms in water.
“It’s wild,” the manager says. “Caffeine usually has a spike, but this just puts you in a good mood.”
“Oh, perfect,” says Coster-Waldau. The man shuffles off to prepare the coffee, which, when it arrives, turns out to be surprisingly drinkable.
You have to be careful when someone asks if you want mushrooms, Coster-Waldau says. I ask if he has heard about the practice of micro-dosing psychedelics and its apparent creative and medicinal benefits. He has not. But the actor recently visited a cannabis shop for the first time and couldn’t believe what he saw. “It’s like you’re walking into an Apple Store, and it just sells weed,” he says. “It used to be that you’d do it in a parking lot, right?”
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