Game Of Cons

Nikolaj Coster-waldau Trades Knight’s Armor for Tattoos and a Shiv in Shot Caller, a Harrowing Glimpse Inside America’s Prison System

- Mary Kaye Schilling

NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU has the best furtive eye roll in the business. In the first episode of the seventh season of Game of Thrones, playing the roguish knight Ser Jaime Lannister, he observes Cersei, his twin and mother of their three dead children, delivering an unhinged declaration of revenge and world domination. As he stands over his sister-lover, Jaime’s expression is priceless—devotion tempered by a sidelong glance of “Yup, she cray-cray.”

Lannister is a classic bad guy. And yet if, as some predict, he will be the final hero of Game of Thrones, viewers will buy it because the Danish actor has, with shadings of warmth and wit, humanized a character that has committed incest, shoved a child from a tower window, and produced and protected a son, Joffrey, of epic villainy.

It’s a neat trick and one that works well in his new film, which is set not in a fantasy landscape but the American prison system. What the actor found was that these two brutal worlds, rife with murderous power plays, aren’t that different, though in the case of Shot Caller, it’s real human beings, not fictional characters, who are doing battle. In the film, Coster-Waldau plays Jake, a successful businessman who accidentally kills a friend while DUI. Up until then, he’s happily married, with a son, living a privileged life in Los Angeles. When a judge gives him a stiff sentence, Jake is incarcerated for seven years in a system that offers two choices, warrior or victim. He chooses the former, and the film dramatizes how prison’s code of ethics (called “gangster school”) eventually replaces Jake’s, transforming him into Money, a soldier in the Aryan brotherhood.