Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Quotes

There's a huge difference between stage fighting and real sword fighting.

I have stage combat training from college, which is drastically different than fighting for the screen, but I do enjoy that kind of stuff.

When I was young, I was trained in stage fighting and rapier and dagger for several years.

I love action. I love stage combat.

The fight scenes are pretty easy and come pretty naturally for me, to be honest.

I got an M.F.A. in acting from NYU, and part of our training is to learn how to use swords in combat situations in a performance and Shakespeare plays where you have to fight.

Fight scenes are very physical for me. Sometimes I require my own body to move through them before I can tell where a character's likely to feel it.

I hate learning lines, so the fight stuff's always my favorite.

The hardest thing is getting fake hit. You really have to sell it. Somebody comes at you and stops a couple inches from your face. You have to react like it's painful. In my training, those were the days I was more sore, doing gut punches or getting thrown against walls. You're moving your body in a way that's not natural.

I always loved stage combat at drama school so I can't wait to get on set and kick some evil monsters into the next dimension!

In drama school, I learned I wasn't as good as I thought I was. But I loved stage combat, and I knew that would pay the bills.

In 'The Matrix,' you see the fight between Keanu Reeves and Lawrence Fishburne. It's an amazing fight. But I know that they've rehearsed it for months beforehand. Because in some of the moves you can see them anticipating blocks before they actually happen.

I come from a huge theater background. The whole action and stunt world just came as the roles were available.

When you get to the point where you know the material so well and you know the character so well that you can just sort of play off of whoever your reader is - that's the best feeling at an audition.

I thought martial arts was going to help me with my movies and TV stuff, but I realized it would not.

On 'Angel' I got to work a lot with Mike Massa, who was David Boreanaz' stunt double, and Mike would let me do most of my stuff by myself. I did almost all my fight scenes by myself.

I enjoy fighting scenes. I like fighting in film. I like pretending to fight in films.

I can't remember ever being involved in a fight in a movie where I haven't done most of it.

I was in 'Rent,' for God's sake. The closest we came to stunts was dancing on a table.

The thing is this: I've got an amazing career in England that couldn't possibly get much better. I do the best theater around, I work at the National Theater, the Old Vic - which I'm sure you've heard of because it's the one Kevin Spacey runs - and I play the most amazing roles and work with the most amazing directors.

I'm an actor. I try to play a character in a really cool story, the very best I can.

For ages, in my lunch hours, I would just go round and choreograph fight scenes. For fun. So now I'm very good at being thrown around. I bounce, in the words of my friends.

To make it more familiar to me, I ended up treating my swordplay scenes like choreography. So it was, 'One and two and three and four and five, and turn and step and down and up and lunge.'

Sword fighting in film is not about how good the fighter is, but how good the actor receiving the blows is.

The best part of being on a television series for all those years is that you really get to hone your craft.