With his dirty golden hair hanging in front of his bloodied face, a sly Jaime Lannister stares up at his captor, Catelyn Stark, who is distraught after learning her husband lost his head at the command of petulant king Joffrey Baratheon. Catelyn is infuriated by Jaime’s arrogance, his sexual and religious insults. She threatens to cut off his own head and send it to his sister, Queen Regent Cersei.
But first, she grills him about the accident that defined the tension between the Starks and the Lannisters on “Game of Thrones.”
Jaime Lannister was decidedly not a virtuous man at the start of “Game of Thrones,” which makes his current journey to fight the good fight — against the army of the dead in the North — all the more momentous.
Glaring steely eyed at Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley) at the end of Season 1, we see Jaime for what he clearly is: a bad guy. He’s the notorious Kingslayer who swore to protect the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mad King Aerys Targaryen, before literally stabbing him in the back. He’s Cersei Lannister’s (Lena Headey) twin brother, secret lover and biological father to all three of her children with Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy): Joffrey (Jack Gleeson), Myrcella (Nell Tiger Free) and Tommen (Dean-Charles Chapman). And yes, he’s the guy who kicked off the show’s initial conflict, leaving sweet Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) paralyzed after he pushed the 10-year-old from a Winterfell tower in order to protect his and Cersei’s incestuous affair.
Jaime’s evolution is powered by one driving force: his love of Cersei. As disturbing as it is, audiences have weirdly come to accept Jaime’s intimate relationship with his sister, understanding that he’s fueled by his desire to not only be with Cersei but help their family maintain power in Westeros.
“[Jaime pushes Bran out of the window] because he understands if this kid tells anyone what he just saw it’ll mean the death of the woman he loves, their three children and himself. And that’s not good,” Nikolaj Coster Waldau, who plays Jaime, told HuffPost during a Build Series segment in 2017. “I never saw him as the villain […] I see him as being a bit of an arrogant prick in the whole beginning, but I try to understand, ‘Why is he being so annoying?’ Well, it’s because everyone’s like, ‘The Kingslayer! The Kingslayer!’”
(Excerpt Read more in: HuffPost
