Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Wonders About the Past 2 Million Years

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau wants people to step away from the abyss when it comes to climate action.

“It’s a very difficult balance,” said the Danish actor, who portrayed Jaime Lannister in “Game of Thrones.” “You want to get people aware, you want to inspire change. But I think we’ve gone overboard by making it into this doomsday.”

“It’s exhausting for everyone,” he added. “And it’s not quite true, actually.”

In “An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet,” a documentary series from Bloomberg Originals, Coster-Waldau meets with scientists, activists and ordinary folks who have developed ingenious solutions to global issues — things like sargassum that captures carbon on St. Vincent, worms that eat plastic in Spain and a zero-waste village in Japan.

It’s an insane endeavor, Coster-Waldau said, but he predicts bluer skies ahead.

“The biggest resource, and we keep forgetting that, is that we need each other,” he said. “What humans can do when we pull together, it’s incredible.”

In a video call from his home north of Copenhagen, Coster-Waldau — who will play William of Normandy in the upcoming “King and Conqueror” series — discussed why George the Poet’s podcast, miniature art and “3 Body Problem” have captured his attention.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

1

Eske Willerslev and His Genetics Research

What he’s doing is understanding who we are by looking back in time. Now they can actually extract DNA from soil samples, so they picked down in northeast Greenland and were able to go back 2 million years. And that means now you can see how this world of ours has changed dramatically many, many times.

2

‘We, the Drowned’ by Carsten Jensen

It’s an amazing novel that I just revisited about Marstal, a small town in Denmark — a seafaring town, a fisherman’s town — and the riders of freight ships from this town. It’s a historical novel, but it’s incredibly well told.