‘Game of Thrones’ star explains why Jaime Lannister is a good person despite all the murder

When we met Jaime Lannister on Game of Thrones, he was hardly the show’s moral compass (that title was easily won by Ned Stark, R.I.P.).

He was charming, powerful, condescending – he was a dick, really, and his character arc throughout the series has been one of the most compelling. As Game of Thrones chipped away at Jaime’s familial responsibilities and relationship with Cersei, a real human being emerged -- and he even made an actual friend through his road trip with Brienne of Tarth.

"I think that my character on Game of Thrones has strong morals,” actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau told Mashable while promoting his latest feature film, Small Crimes. “It’s all about other people’s needs, about his sister’s needs. And I think that in Small Crimes, Joe is all about himself."

“I think he is a good person,” Coster-Waldau said of Jaime. “I think he’s also very flawed, and I think that he could benefit from a bit of Joe from Small Crimes, being a little more selfish... he is a good person; I think he’s done horrible things, but he’s always had a reason.”

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

In Small Crimes, Coster-Waldau plays anti-hero Joe Denton, a former police officer who goes to prison and tries to piece his life back together once he’s out.

“I think most of us have a lot more of Joe than we want to even admit. I think we’re all fundamentally very selfish,” Coster-Waldau said. “What I liked about the script was that it surprised me when I read it, that I wasn’t expecting him to be so self-destructive.”

“He doesn’t make it easy for anyone around him,” Coster-Waldau added. “He’s a very greedy guy ... he’s an addict on many, many levels. The whole concept of saying no and walking away is unfortunately foreign to him.”

Shooting a low-budget feature was a “massive difference” from the grand scale of Game of Thrones.

“If you have an action sequence in Small Crimes, like in the end there’s a shootout, we had like a day and a half to shoot that and we had bad weather so it was very complicated, we were running behind -- a sequence like that, we would have two weeks with a crew of 300 people to shoot on Game of Thrones, and here we have 30 people,” Coster-Waldau said. “So obviously that’s the difference. The work in itself, you have a camera, you have someone in front and someone behind and that’s the same, but I love doing these things where it’s intense and where you work all the time and where it’s all about the characters 'cause that’s what you have. If you don’t have the money to make it about something else, it has to be about the story. It’s just different versions of the same job.”

Small Crimes is now streaming on Netflix.