Don’t believe everything you see on TV, guys. On Sunday’s episode of Game of Thrones, Euron Greyjoy and Jaime Lannister fought to the death (we won’t say whose death, in case you aren’t caught up yet). But in real life, the men who play these characters — Pilou Asbaek and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, respectively — get on just fine. In fact, Asbaek used to babysit Coster-Waldau’s children. Yep, you read that right. The mad pirate king used to be a manny!
Asbaek spilled the tea in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly that, for obvious reasons, has started to make the rounds again. As Asbaek tells it, he and Coster-Waldau go way back, which is how he ended up essentially working for his old friend. “We’re actually good friends because we both come from Denmark and — he will hate me saying this, but it’s true — I was the manny for his kids before I became an actor in 2003. I was like 19, 20 years old.” But it gets even better. Not only was Asbaek a manny for his now-GoT-costar, but he was also pursuing a career in early childhood education. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I thought I wanted to be a teacher because I love kids. I was like a substitute teacher at a kindergarten and his kids were there and I was a manny for them,” Asbaek revealed.
You know what this means, right? Despite his abrasive ways on GoT, Euron is a sweet bunny rabbit in real-life human form.
Naturally, this puts the very recent fate of his character in a different light. (Warning: Spoilers are imminent.) Don’t go feeling too bad for Asbaek, though. He feels fairly confident that Euron got a fitting send-off.
“I think he’s the only one with a happy end,” Asbaek told The New York Times on Monday. “The character was so lucky. He got to go to bed with the queen. He got to kill a dragon. And he almost killed Jaime Lannister. So out of my five scenes this season, three of them were spectacular or fun. First of all, the way they’ve written these scripts, so much is put into it. You can just relax, enjoy it, be in it as much as possible and wait for that moment for your character to shine. It’s so well-written that every single character has at least a couple of those moments… until they die.”
Since we don’t like the thought of adorable manny Asbaek impaled (in character on GoT), we’re going to hold onto the hope that perhaps he isn’t really dead yet. After all, they didn’t spell out that Euron was dead beyond a shadow of a doubt. And as Asbaek told the Times, his character has potential. “I want Euron to go on his ship Silence, and we follow him as he travels the world, as he finds the magical Dragonbinder horn, and he becomes a mysterious lord of the night!” the actor gushed of a spinoff idea.
Then again, if that doesn’t come to fruition, there’s always manny-ing. There are parents who would undoubtedly pay top dollar to have the mad pirate king watch their kids.
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