How Nikolaj Coster-Waldau helped bring Against the Ice, story of Arctic adventure now on Netflix, to our screens

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau not only stars in Against the Ice, he co-wrote the movie, adapted at the queen of Denmark’s suggestion from an explorer’s account

He talks about the challenges of making a film of Ejnar Mikkelsen’s perilous 1909 sled journey across Greenland’s ice, shot on location there and in Iceland

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Nikolaj Coster Waldau as Ejnar Mikkelsen in Against the Ice, adapted from a Danish explorer’s account of his adventure-filled 1909 journey with a companion across the ice of northern Greenland. Photo: Lilja Jonsdottir/Netflix

Published: 7:15pm, 7 Mar 2022

Winter could have been over for Nikolaj Coster-Waldau when Game of Thrones ended in 2019, but the Danish star put himself back in the snow for his latest adventure, Against the Ice.

The film, which is now available on Netflix, follows the wild saga of Denmark’s Ejnar Mikkelsen, a captain, explorer and author who set out in 1909 to recover the maps and journals of a failed Artic expedition a few years prior.

At stake was a dispute over Northeast Greenland, which the United States had claimed and which the Dutch were attempting to invalidate by proving that Greenland was one island. Mikkelsen had only his sled dogs and one inexperienced mate at his side for the mission, which kept getting more complicated.

It’s a project that has been with Coster-Waldau for almost a decade. Director Peter Flinth, a friend from school, sent Mikkelsen’s book Two Against the Ice to consider.

There is just such a sense of accomplishment and pride in this movie, because it was not an easy one to make

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

Flinth had heard about it from the Queen of Denmark, Margrethe II, who had mentioned to Flinth that it might make a good movie.