Game of Thrones Nikolaj Coster-Waldau on the Evolution of Jaime Lannister

Should you still be reeling from Sunday night's blood-soaked Game of Thrones episode, fear not: There are still some good characters left, right? Take Jaime Lannister, for example. He's certainly come along way since his days of pushing kids out windows after being caught sleeping with his sister. This season he's been much more gallant and empathetic, by saving his hired escort Brienne of Tarth and, of course, now that he's sans his fighting hand. Well, he's still quite smug and arrogant, but there's much more depth to his smugness and arrogance. Behind the piece of work that is Jaime Lannister is Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who's been consistently brilliant to watch over the course of the series. Ahead of this Sunday's season-three finale, we talked to Coster-Waldau about the evolution of Jaime Lannister, why Robb Stark is stupid, and shooting his new film The Other Woman, in which he also plays a dude who has questionable ethics in the romance department.
ESQUIRE.COM: When you get a new Game of Thrones script, what's the first thing you do?
NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU: It's exciting. I know the story lines in broad strokes, but the actual words ... It's always exciting and surprising. I read it and then I read it again. Usually we get a batch of four or five, which is pretty cool. It's such a mental task to produce the show. They have to get the story lines ready. They do the production schedule for the whole season in one go because it's too expensive to go back and forth. If you do a normal series, sometimes you'd get the script three days before the episode. We don't have that, which is great, actually.
ESQ: In looking back from when you started Game of Thrones to where we are now, how do you see Jaime evolving?
NCW: When we started out, I knew where we would potentially get if we were lucky enough to be allowed to keep going. When we did get to season three, I knew what was coming. The thing with Jaime is that at the core, he's the same guy. He has all these secrets. As an actor, secrets and obstacles fuel the character. The biggest secret he's been carrying for so many years — the truth of what happened when he killed The Mad King — to finally get that off his chest was a great scene to do, but was also a great target to have in the way we told the story about him. For an audience, it seems like he's changed a lot. He started out doing this hideous thing to Bran

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