Peter Dinklage Won’t Be Type-Cast: ‘I Never Want To Repeat Myself’
In a new interview, Peter Dinklage reflects on his acting credits and how it’s not all about his height, while promoting his newest musical film, Cyrano.
Speaking to The Independent, Dinklage, 52, said, “After you’ve played Tyrion, everyone wants you to play Tyrion. Or a version of him. And that’s what you shouldn’t be doing. I never want to repeat myself: part of the fun of acting is getting to be somebody different each time.” Dinklage won four primetime Emmys and a Golden Globe for his performance as Game of Thrones’ dwarf prince Tyrion Lannister. Over eight years, Dinklage’s performance as the brilliant, brave, romantic and drunk Lannister made him globally famous.
Since then, Dinklage has starred in movies completely different from his Tyrion character, but has now landed a starring role in his most Tyrion-esque character since Thrones. Playing the lead in Cyrano, a new musical adaptation of the play Cyrano de Bergerac, it’s the film version of a 2019 Broadway play in which Dinklage also starred. Written by Erica Schmidt, her 2019 version is based on the original 1897 play, written by Edmond Rostand, which fictionalizes the real-life story of a 17th-century French writer and duelist.
“Erica Schmidt, our brilliant adapter and screenwriter, was commissioned to write a stage version of Cyrano de Bergerac,” Dinklage explains. “But the original is quite long, and it was written 120 years ago when people didn’t have the internet and didn’t mind how long they spent in the theater. We’re more distracted now. Erica stripped it down to its bare essentials, took the monologues about love and turned them into love songs.” For the lyrics and music, she recruited musicians from the indie-rock band The National, whom Dinklage discovered after hearing them in a Game of Thrones make-up trailer in Northern Ireland. “I told Erica to listen to them, because they sing about love and heartbreak, and they are such Renaissance men that they threw themselves into the project wholeheartedly.”
Watch the trailer for Cyrano below, out now:
