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FX's Gone Hollywood Casts Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau has been cast in FX’s new drama series Gone Hollywood. Coster-Waldau’s acting resume stretches back to the 1990s when he got his start in movies in his native Denmark. Coster-Waldau then made the jump to Hollywood, with early roles in Black Hawk Down, Wimbledon and Kingdom of Heaven.
But Coster-Waldau of course received the biggest break of his career when he landed the role of Jaime Lannister on HBO’s epic fantasy series Game of Thrones. Coster-Waldau’s run on the show began in villainous fashion, with the infamous scene where he pushed Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) from a high window after the young lad spied Jaime engaging in unnatural acts with his sister Cersei (Lena Headey). But Jaime’s arc would later bring him to redemption, as he became a fan favorite character largely thanks to his touching relationship with the valiant Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie). Coster-Waldau’s character would survive to the show’s penultimate episode when he finally met his demise, appropriately in his sister Cersei’s arms, as Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and her dragon lay waste to King’s Landing.
With Game of Thrones now a thing of the past, Coster-Waldau has lined up his first big post-Jaime Lannister TV role, taking on a part in FX’s upcoming drama series Gone Hollywood (via EW). The show will also star Coster-Waldau’s one-time Game of Thrones co-star Jonathan Pryce, along with Lola Kirke, John Magaro, Ben Schnetzer and Judd Hirsch. Ted Griffin (Ocean’s Eleven) is penning and will direct the series' pilot, with Scott Rudin serving as executive producer.
Set in 1980, Gone Hollywood is loosely based on the real life story of how Creative Artists Agency began in the 1970s, as a group of agents broke away from the old Hollywood machine to form their own agency, eventually rising to dominance in the industry. The show will reportedly blend depictions of real-life movie figures together with its fictional characters.
Obviously, heading back to Hollywood of the 1980s marks a major switch for Coster-Waldau after he spent the better part of a decade donning battle armor and a fake hand for the role of Jaime Lannister. Gone Hollywood sounds closer to the great AMC series Mad Men, which also depicted the inner workings of an industry, in that case the advertising industry. Of course, Mad Men derived a lot of its entertainment value from the personal travails of the characters rather than inside material about Madison Avenue. Given FX’s own track record of putting daring and sometimes controversial shows on TV, Gone Hollywood has a chance to be a very intriguing project indeed.
