This ‘Game of Thrones’ Star Is Taking His Search for Climate Solutions Global

Daphne Chouliaraki Milner

The world has changed a lot since Season 1 of An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet premiered in 2024. Season 2 starts in your native Denmark, and then takes you to many other countries the world over. What feels different this time around in the stories you’re telling and the way you’re approaching them?

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

It really does feel different this time. What I love about the show being global is that it gives you perspective. It’s so easy to get caught up in where you are. From Denmark, for example, the presence of war in Europe feels like it’s expanding, and other issues like climate have slipped down the ladder of interest, which is understandable but worrying.

When we started this season, I was questioning the optimism in An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet. So much seemed to be pulling in the wrong direction. But doing the show again has reminded me how much the human spirit—and our thirst for innovation, finding solutions, helping each other—is still very much an integral part of who we are. That gives me real reason for optimism and hope. It’s easy to lose sight of that because we’re caught in these social media echo chambers, especially with the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. People are constantly being fed information that confirms their bias, yet they are very adamant they’re seeing the full truth.

What’s changed for me is also how I think about climate communication. There’s been a tendency to scare people into caring, to create doomsday narratives that say if we don’t act now, the world will end. But that doesn’t work in the long term. These issues won’t be solved in our lifetime or in our kids’ lifetime; they take generations. You can’t keep saying the wolf is coming every other day.

A good example is how we sometimes misuse science, saying the poles are melting and sea levels will rise by 7.5 meters [24.6 feet], which is true only if the ice caps melt completely, thousands of years from now. That kind of exaggeration backfires. It makes it easy for people to dismiss the real crisis as a hoax. The reality is already bad enough. Just look at the extreme weather we’re seeing now, or the loss of biodiversity and pollution. It’s already completely out of whack, and it’s only going to get worse. That should be scary enough.

Daphne

I think that’s also where our responsibility comes in as storytellers, whether as writers or filmmakers. And I want to return to what you said earlier about hope and the intergenerational aspect of it. But before that, I have a more logistical question about the second season. You travel through so many different environments, from coastal cities to farmlands to innovation hubs. How did you decide where to film?

Nikolaj

It was really based on lessons from Season 1 and on going to places we hadn’t been before. In the first season, we wanted to film in India, but didn’t want to travel all that way for just one story. It needed to be part of a full block. So for Season 2, we planned three main shooting blocks: one in the Americas, one in India, and one in Europe.

We combed through all these incredible stories happening around the world. That’s the fun part because it shows there’s so much innovation everywhere. And then, of course, there’s the logistical side: How do we actually make it work? What helped was looking at the themes we wanted to explore this season—water, waste management, and energy were big ones—and choosing stories that felt distinct but connected through those threads. And while we always include a stop in Canada because our production company is based there, the rest really comes down to curiosity and logistics.