Nikolaj Coster-Waldau fears society's obsession with youth and technology stems from worry over death

Speaking to The Independent from New Jersey during promotional work for the BBC drama King and Conqueror, the Danish actor said: "(Fear of death is) why we have an industry of things you can buy to pretend it doesn't exist, whether it's facial treatments, hormone injections or plastic surgery.

"But it's a waste of time trying to inject too much energy into that fear, because there still hasn't been anyone who's not ended up dead."

Recalling the death of William the Conqueror, the figure he portrays in King and Conqueror, he added: "He wanted to be buried in Cannes, in France, and they had this stone sarcophagus ready for him, but he was quite large at the end of his life, and it took time to get his body there.

"In the French heat, he became kind of like a whale, with the gases. They had to poke a hole in him, so he kind of... exploded.

"There's something really funny about it - at the end of the day, he's just a big ball of rotten flesh."

Turning to the rise of AI, Nikolaj added: "For some reason, with AI, we're being told that there is no choice, and only one way forward, and it has to be as fast as we can, in case someone else gets there first. But what are we aiming for?

"Our politicians are just going, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' - because we are told, 'The Chinese are coming, the Russians are coming, the Americans are coming!'

"And in the meantime, you just see the stock prices of these companies going shooooop!"

Nikolaj, who has also been filming the second season of his Bloomberg TV documentary An Optimist's Guide to the Planet, went on to link the themes of King and Conqueror to today's conflicts.

He said: "You look at these guys and their immense ambition, and of course you see today, all these men who want to rule the world, and all these wars happening.

"The irony, of course, is that this show is set 1,000 years ago, and nothing seems to have changed.

"We have rulers who manipulate, and very quickly they invoke some kind of religious supernatural power, on their behalf, to control people, and then people go along with it."

He added: "Leaders create all these f****** narratives about how their war is just.

"We do learn from history, but we also repeat a lot of things."