Peter Dinklage

Peter Hayden Dinklage (born June 11, 1969) is an American actor best known for portraying Tyrion Lannister on the HBO television series Game of Thrones (2011–2019), for which he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series a record four times.

Dinklage was born on June 11, 1969, either at the Jersey Shore region of New Jersey, or in Morristown, New Jersey, to John Carl Dinklage, an insurance salesman, and Diane Dinklage, an elementary school music teacher of German and Irish descent.

He grew up in the historic Brookside section of Mendham Township, with his parents and older brother Jonathan.

He is the only member of his family with achondroplasia.

He was raised Catholic.

As a child, Dinklage and his brother performed puppet musicals for people in their neighborhood.

He has described his brother Jonathan as "the real performer of the family", saying that his brother's passion for the violin was the only thing that kept him from pursuing acting.

(Jonathan graduated from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and is currently a violinist and concertmaster for the musical Hamilton. )

Dinklage had his first theatrical success in a fifth-grade production of The Velveteen Rabbit.

Playing the lead, he was delighted by the audience's response to the show.

He attended Delbarton School, a Catholic preparatory school for boys, where he developed his acting skills.

In 1984, he was inspired to pursue an acting career by a production of Sam Shepard's play True West.

He attended Bennington College, where he studied for a drama degree and appeared in numerous productions before graduating in 1991.

He moved to New York City with his friend Ian Bell to build a theater company; failing to pay the rent, they had to move out of their apartment.

He subsequently lived in New York for 20 years in Williamsburg and the West Village, then worked six years for a data-processing company before again pursuing a full-time acting career.

Dinklage initially struggled to find acting work, partially because he refused to take the roles typically offered to actors with his condition, such as "elves or leprechauns".

He made his film debut in the black comedy film Living in Oblivion (1995), and had his breakthrough with a starring role in the 2003 comedy-drama The Station Agent.

He had a credited film debut in the low-budget independent comedy-drama Living in Oblivion (1995), where he starred alongside Steve Buscemi.

It tells the story of a director, crew, and cast filming a low-budget independent film in New York City.

Dinklage's role was that of a frustrated actor with dwarfism who complains about his clichéd roles.

The next year, he appeared as a building manager in the crime drama Bullet starring rapper Tupac Shakur.

Even after his well-received performance in Living in Oblivion, Dinklage could not find someone willing to be his agent.

After a recommendation from Buscemi to director Alexandre Rockwell, Dinklage was cast in the comedy 13 Moons (2002).

When later interviewed for a theater website, he was asked what his ideal role was, and he replied "the romantic lead" who gets the girl.

His other films include Elf (2003), Lassie (2005), Find Me Guilty (2006), Penelope (2006), Death at a Funeral (2007), The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008), Death at a Funeral (2010), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023).

Dinklage has also performed in theater, with roles including the title character in Richard III (2003) at the Public Theatre, Rakitin in A Month in the Country (2015) at Classic Stage Company, and Cyrano de Bergerac in Cyrano at the Daryl Roth Theatre in 2019.

Dinklage found his breakthrough playing Finbar McBride, who is a quiet, withdrawn, unmarried man in the 2003 Tom McCarthy-directed film The Station Agent.

According to co-star Bobby Cannavale, the film took three years to make and was not at first written with Dinklage in mind.

Cannavale said McCarthy "set out to tell a story about a guy who was a train enthusiast who had chosen to isolate himself from the world," but when McCarthy actually started "putting pen to paper" for the screenplay, he decided to write the role for him.

Speaking about the role, Dinklage noted that usually "roles written for someone my size are a little flat"—often either comical or "sort of Lord of the Rings" type characters filled with wisdom; further: "They're not sexual, they're not romantic" and "they're not flawed."

What attracted him to the character McCarthy had written was that it was not one of the stereotypical roles people with dwarfism play; rather, McBride has "romantic feelings" as well as "anger and ... flaws."

The role earned him the Independent Spirit Award and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor nominations.

In the New York Observer, reviewer Andrew Sarris wrote, "Dinklage projects both size and intelligence in the fascinating reticence of his face."

Besides being Dinklage's highest-rated film on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, The Station Agent was modestly successful at the box office, earning over $8 million against its small budget.

He also received a Golden Globe Award in 2011 and a Screen Actors Guild Award in 2020 for the role.

Dinklage has a common form of dwarfism known as achondroplasia and stands 4ft 5in tall.

He has used his celebrity status to raise social awareness of dwarfism.

Dinklage studied acting at Bennington College, performing in a number of amateur stage productions.

In 2018, he appeared as Eitri in the Marvel film Avengers: Infinity War and Hervé Villechaize in the biopic film My Dinner with Hervé.

He also provided voice-acting for the video game Destiny, and in 2023 voiced Scourge in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.