Nikolaj Coster-Waldau goes ‘Against the Ice’ in Netflix pic

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. Flinth had heard about it from the Queen of Denmark Margrethe II who had mentioned to Flinth that it might make a good movie. Coster-Waldau agreed and not only does he star: He also co-wrote the script with his longtime friend and collaborator Joe Derrick.

“It was a long journey. It was a complicated book to adapt.” Coster-Waldau, 51, said in a recent interview. “I’ve always loved survival stories, explorers who go to unknown places. It’s exciting. But what really caught me here was it was an unusual combination. Normally both men would have had the same ambitions and hopes but here one of them was a famous explorer and the other was literally just a mechanic. This is what actually saves them, that they were so different.”

They shot on location on glaciers mostly in Iceland, some in Greenland, and relied minimally on CGI. In casting Joe Cole as Mikkelsen’s very green companion Iver Iversen, the...