Peter Dinklage

• 1. Introduction

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  At the 2012 Golden Globe ceremony, Peter Dinklage stepped up to accept the award for Best Supporting Actor in a series, miniseries or television film. He did not use the moment for a list of thank-yous. He told the room he had been thinking about a gentleman and suggested that everyone Google his name. That name soon trended worldwide on social media.

  Talk shows then offered Dinklage airtime to explain himself, and he turned them down. One sentence on a famous stage, followed by deliberate quiet, tells you something about the actor. Who was the man he named? Why did Dinklage refuse every invitation to say more? And how did he get onto that stage in the first place?

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• 2. Before the Break

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  On the 11th of June 1969, Peter Hayden Dinklage was born in the Jersey Shore region of New Jersey. His father, John Carl Dinklage, sold insurance. His mother, Diane, taught elementary school music and had German and Irish roots. The family lived in the Brookside section of Mendham Township, where Peter grew up alongside his older brother Jonathan. Peter is the only member of the family with achondroplasia, and the household was Catholic.

  Puppet musicals were the brothers' first productions, staged for people in their neighborhood. Dinklage later called Jonathan "the real performer of the family". He said only Jonathan's passion for the violin kept him from acting. Jonathan studied at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and he later served as violinist and concertmaster for the musical Hamilton.

  A fifth-grade production of The Velveteen Rabbit gave Dinklage his first stage success. He played the lead and loved how the audience reacted. At Delbarton School, a Catholic preparatory school for boys, he sharpened his craft. In 1984, a production of Sam Shepard's play True West convinced him to chase acting as a career.

  Bennington College awarded Dinklage a drama degree in 1991, after he had appeared in numerous productions there. He then moved to New York City with his friend Ian Bell, hoping to build a theater company. The two could not pay the rent and had to leave their apartment. In the early 1990s he also played in a "punk-funk-rap" band called Whizzy. During a show at the nightclub CBGB, someone accidentally kneed him in the face and he bled onstage. The injury left a scar running from his neck to his eyebrow.

  Dinklage ended up living in New York for 20 years, in Williamsburg and then the West Village. For six years he worked at a data-processing company before returning to acting full time. The parts waiting for him there came with a catch.

  "Elves or leprechauns" were the roles typically offered to actors with his condition, and Dinklage refused them. That refusal is a large part of why work came slowly at first.

  In 1995 he made his credited film debut in Living in Oblivion, a low-budget independent comedy-drama with Steve Buscemi. The film follows a director, a crew and a cast trying to shoot a low-budget independent movie in New York City. Dinklage played a frustrated actor with dwarfism who complains about his clichéd roles.

  The next year he played a building manager in the crime drama Bullet, which starred the rapper Tupac Shakur. Even after warm notices for Living in Oblivion, no agent would sign him. Buscemi then recommended him to the director Alexandre Rockwell, and Dinklage was cast in the 2002 comedy 13 Moons.

  A theater website once asked about his ideal role. He answered, "to play the romantic lead and get the girl." A screenplay arriving the following year would come close to granting that wish.

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• 3. The Station Agent

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  Finbar McBride is a quiet, withdrawn, unmarried man, and playing him in the 2003 film The Station Agent gave Dinklage his breakthrough. Tom McCarthy directed. Co-star Bobby Cannavale said the film took three years to make and was not first written with Dinklage in mind.

  Cannavale described McCarthy's original idea as a story about "a guy who was a train enthusiast who had chosen to isolate himself from the world." Once McCarthy was "putting pen to paper", he decided to write the part for Dinklage.

  Dinklage explained why the role mattered to him. Parts written for someone his size, he said, are usually "a little flat". They tend to be either comic or wise characters in the vein of "Lord of the Rings". "They're not sexual, they're not romantic," he said, and "they're not flawed." McBride was different, with "romantic feelings" as well as "anger and... flaws."

  The performance earned Dinklage Best Actor nominations from the Independent Spirit Awards and the Screen Actors Guild. In the New York Observer, the reviewer Andrew Sarris wrote, "Dinklage projects both size and intelligence in the fascinating reticence of his face." On Rotten Tomatoes it remains his highest-rated film. It earned over $8 million against a small budget.

  Also in 2003 came Tiptoes, a direct-to-DVD film with Gary Oldman and Matthew McConaughey. Reviews were negative, especially about Oldman playing a person with dwarfism. Dinklage said the original cut was "gorgeous", but the director was fired soon after delivering it. The studio re-cut the picture into a "rom-com with dwarfs." On the controversy he recalled that people asked, "Why would you put Gary Oldman on his knees? That's almost like blackface." His own reply was that it was Gary Oldman, who could do whatever he wanted.

  That year he also appeared in Elf as Miles Finch, an irritable children's author. Finch beats up Buddy Hobbs, played by Will Ferrell, after Buddy mistakes him for an elf. Dinklage also worked in several off-Broadway productions, including a title role as Richard III. In the years after, steady character work would fill his schedule.

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• 4. Hired for Character

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  In 2005, Dinklage starred in Threshold, a short-lived CBS science fiction series. The same year he played a wedding planner in the comedy The Baxter and a traveling circus performer in the adventure Lassie.

  Sidney Lumet directed Find Me Guilty in 2006, with Vin Diesel as the lead. It dramatizes the longest Mafia trial in American history, and Dinklage played the lead defense attorney, Ben Klandis. Critics were mostly positive, though the film failed commercially. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praised Dinklage and called his character "concise, articulate and professional."

  Television filled out 2006 as well. Dinklage played Marlowe Sawyer in episodes of Nip/Tuck and a fictionalized version of himself in an episode of HBO's Entourage. He also appeared as Stewart on NBC's 30 Rock. In the British romantic comedy Penelope he played Lemon, a tabloid reporter, and critics were mixed.

  Death at a Funeral, a British comedy from 2007, brought him back for its 2010 American remake. Later in 2007 he played the villainous Simon Bar Sinister in Underdog. Reviews were poor, but the film had some commercial success.

  Trumpkin, in the 2008 film The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, was his next big part. The film earned $419.7 million worldwide and was still seen as a disappointment next to its predecessor. The critic Bill Gibron called Dinklage's role a "cutesy stereotype he has tried to avoid."

  Later in 2008, Dinklage took the title role in Uncle Vanya at Bard College's annual Bard SummerScape on the Annandale-on-Hudson campus. His wife, Erica Schmidt, directed. In 2010 he appeared in the Australian movie I Love You Too, alongside Brendan Cowell and Peter Helliar. HBO would soon hand him the part that outgrew all of these.

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• 5. Tyrion Lannister

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  In May 2009, Dinklage became the first actor cast in HBO's Game of Thrones. The series adapts George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels and is set on the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos. Noble families fight for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms. Dinklage played Tyrion Lannister, a member of House Lannister, one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Westeros. Tyrion uses that status to cushion the derision he has faced all his life.

  The showrunners, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, said Dinklage was their first choice. They called him funny, smart and witty. His "core of humanity, covered by a shell of sardonic dry wit, is pretty well in keeping with the character," they said.

  Dinklage came to the first meeting unfamiliar with the books and cautious. He was choosy about genre parts. Benioff and Weiss described Tyrion as "a different kind of fantasy little person." In Dinklage's words, that meant "No beard, no pointy shoes, a romantic, real human being." He agreed to play Tyrion before the meeting was half over, partly because, he said, "They told me how popular he was." Martin later said, "If he hadn't accepted the part, oh, boy, I don't know what we would have done."

  The series was a commercial success and was renewed for multiple seasons. It ran from 2011 and concluded with its eighth season in May 2019. Matthew Gilbert of The Boston Globe called Dinklage's work "a winning performance that is charming, morally ambiguous, and self-aware." Dan Kois of The New York Times said it made Tyrion "all the more popular." The Los Angeles Times wrote, "In many ways, Game of Thrones belongs to Dinklage." HuffPost named Tyrion the show's "most quotable" character.

  Dinklage won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2011, 2015-2018 and 2019. He is the only cast member to receive a Primetime Emmy. He also won a Screen Actors Guild award for the role, and the series gave him top billing starting in its second season. Across his career, as of 2024, he had won thirty-two awards from seventy-six nominations. They include nine Primetime Emmy nominations and sixteen Screen Actors Guild nominations.

  On The Late Show with David Letterman in 2014, Dinklage admitted he had tried reading the books and found them confusing. He joked that Martin would probably kill his character off for saying so. That same year he and four co-stars became some of the highest-paid actors on television, though sources disagree on the per-episode figures. In 2015 he voiced Tyrion again in Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series, a video game.

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• 6. Villains and Voices

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  Ice Age: Continental Drift in 2012 gave Dinklage his first voice-acting job, as Captain Gutt. He rested his voice before recording and said he prefers roles he has not done before. A year earlier he had appeared opposite Kate Hudson in Nicole Kassell's A Little Bit of Heaven.

  Saturday Night Live brought him in for an appearance in 2013. He returned to host an episode in April 2016, and one sketch had him singing a new song called "Space Pants" with Gwen Stefani. He received praise for the hosting.

  In 2014 he starred in the comedy horror film Knights of Badassdom with Ryan Kwanten and Steve Zahn. Three friends head into the woods for a live-action Dungeons & Dragons game and accidentally conjure a demon from Hell. That year he also played the villain Bolivar Trask in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Dinklage said he did not want to treat Trask as a villain, because Trask "actually sees what he's doing as a good thing."

  He voiced the AI character Ghost in the video game Destiny in 2014. In August 2015, Nolan North replaced him. Executive producer Mark Noseworthy blamed scheduling trouble caused by Dinklage's other acting commitments.

  In 2015 Dinklage played a former arcade champion named Eddie Plant in the science fiction comedy Pixels. Director Chris Columbus said Plant was partly inspired by Billy Mitchell. The film was critically panned, though The Guardian praised Dinklage within what it called a "dreary romp". In 2016 he voiced The Mighty Eagle in The Angry Birds Movie and recorded a song for its soundtrack.

  Rememory, a 2017 independent film, failed to impress reviewers, but his role as Sam Bloom drew praise. Yasmin Kleinbart wrote that "Dinklage deserves better than this film." John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter said he "delivers a soulful lead performance that will attract fans' attention." Also in 2017, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, directed by Martin McDonagh, and the drama Three Christs both played at the Toronto International Film Festival. The first received widespread critical success. In 2018 he played Eitri, a giant dwarf, in Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War.

  In 2020 he appeared as the pirate Fannybaws in the music video of the same name by the Scottish power metal band Alestorm. He also played the mobster Roman Lunyov in the crime thriller I Care a Lot. Tony Sokol praised the work and compared the character to Russian mobsters in Training Day and Orange is the New Black.

  2023 brought Terrorcon Scourge, the main antagonist he voiced in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. It also brought the romantic comedy-drama She Came to Me and the role of Casca Highbottom in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. In 2024 he voiced Dr. Dillamond in the two-part film adaptation of the musical Wicked, with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in the cast. He also recorded "Something Bad", featuring Erivo, for Wicked: The Soundtrack. That same year he had a cameo in Jerry Seinfeld's Netflix film Unfrosted.

  In 2024 Dinklage voiced Hercule Poirot in an Audible adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles. He returned to the role in 2025's The A.B.C. Murders. The film The Toxic Avenger, with Dinklage in the title role, was released on the 29th of August 2025. Also in 2025, he played the main antagonist Leon Prater in the first season of Dexter: Resurrection. Some of his most personal projects, though, he built himself.

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• 7. Projects of His Own

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  In 2005, Dinklage married Erica Schmidt, a theater director. They have two children, a daughter born in 2011 and a son born in 2017. The family lives mainly in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, and has a property in Ulster County, New York.

  Schmidt wrote Cyrano, a stage musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac with songs by the band The National. Dinklage starred in the title role in August and September 2018. A 2021 film adaptation followed, and it earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. He also played Cyrano at the Daryl Roth Theatre in 2019. His other stage work includes Richard III at the Public Theatre in 2003 and Rakitin in A Month in the Country at Classic Stage Company in 2015.

  In 2016, Dinklage and his longtime manager David Ginsburg founded the production company Estuary Films. Its first picture was I Think We're Alone Now, a post-apocalyptic drama in which Dinklage plays Del, who forms a companionship with Grace, played by Elle Fanning. The film premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and reached theaters on the 14th of September 2018.

  My Dinner with Hervé grew from years of work by Dinklage and the writer-director Sacha Gervasi. It concerns the final days of the actor Hervé Villechaize, who died by suicide shortly after a 1993 interview with Gervasi. Dinklage played Villechaize in 2018, with Jamie Dornan as co-star, and HBO approved the film.

  On the 5th of October 2017, Dinklage bought the rights to a film adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale's novel The Thicket. The finished film, starring Dinklage with Juliette Lewis and Esme Creed-Miles, was released in September 2024. Another project from 2019 was Brothers, announced with Josh Brolin as co-star. Max Barbakow directed from a screenplay by Macon Blair, based on a story by Etan Cohen. It reached release in October 2024.

  Dinklage's working life has produced one more strand that goes beyond acting. He has used his visibility to speak on questions that matter to him.

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• 8. Speaking Up

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  Martin Henderson was the name Dinklage asked the Golden Globes audience to look up. Henderson was a man with dwarfism from Somerset, England. A rugby fan in a bar tossed him and badly injured him. Dinklage's words pushed dwarf-tossing into public attention, and Henderson's name trended around the world. Henderson died of his injuries in 2016, five years after the incident.

  Dinklage declined the talk show offers that followed. Twenty years earlier, he explained, he might have accepted them, but he was now "a little bit more at peace with things." He said, "I said what I wanted to say... I have a friend who says the world doesn't need another angry dwarf."

  In 2003, Dinklage said that in his youth he was often angry and bitter. As he aged, he decided he "just has to have a sense of humor" because "it's not your problem. It's theirs." He stands 4 ft 5 in tall. His head and torso are average-sized, but his limbs are shorter than average.

  In 2012, someone asked whether he saw himself as a spokesman for the rights of little people. He answered, "Everyone's different. Every person my size has a different life, a different history." He added, "Just because I'm seemingly okay with it, I can't preach how to be okay with it." He has still been viewed as a role model by many people who share his condition.

  In January 2022 he appeared on WTF with Marc Maron and criticized Disney's plan for the Seven Dwarfs in the live-action remake of the 1937 animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney had cast a Latina actress as Snow White, he said, but kept a damaging stereotype. Disney replied that it was taking a different approach and consulting members of the dwarfism community. The wrestler and actor Hornswoggle, who also has dwarfism, criticized Dinklage, claiming he was trying to reduce roles for dwarf actors.

  His causes reach beyond that debate. Dinklage became a vegetarian at the age of 16. On the podcast Flagrant in 2024 he said he began eating fish and chicken again while filming Game of Thrones in Croatia, after fatigue set in on set. He still avoids red meat. He supports Farm Sanctuary and has been spokesperson for its Walk for Farm Animals. He also appeared in a PETA campaign urging Game of Thrones fans to adopt shelter pets instead of buying huskies that resemble direwolves. In 2017 he attended the Women's March demonstration in Park City, Utah.

  Disney's statement said it would share more once the Snow White film entered production after a lengthy development period.

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