How Peter Dinklage (Tyrion) was convinced to join Game of Thrones

Although he was the show’s first choice to play Tyrion, Peter Dinklage wasn’t eager to join the cast of Game of Thrones. Here’s how they won him over.

Back when Game of Thrones was just getting off the ground, no one knew it would go on to become a pop culture phenomenon. As the series went on, actors were clamoring for roles, but at the beginning, it could have been as a risk. Would the show be successful? If it fails, is that all I’ll be remembered for?

Before he was cast as Tyrion Lannister, Peter Dinklage had some of these thoughts. Based on his work in The Station Agent and Living in Oblivion, Dinklage was always the first choice to play Tyrion, but the producers had to overcome his initial resistance. “We thought right away that role would be the trickiest,” creator George R.R. Martin said in James Hibberd’s Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon. “We agreed we wanted an actual dwarf to play Tyrion; we didn’t want to do what Lord of the Rings did where they take John Rhys-Davies and shrink him down to play Gimli. If Peter had turned us down we would have been screwed.”

Dinklage had previously played a dwarf in 2008’s Prince Caspian, and didn’t sound eager to jump back into a fantasy role where he played a character known as an “imp” and “half-man”. He sounds like he was a little put off fantasy in general. “I wouldn’t go anywhere near that stuff — fantasy,” he said. “As soon as I heard about [Thrones] I was like, ‘No.'”

"In fantasy, everybody speaks in broad strokes. There’s no intimacy. There’s dragons and big speeches, and there’s nothing to hold on to. And for somebody my size, it’s f**king death, the opposite of [the activism] I was involved with."

Of course, he did eventually take the role, thanks to a kickass pilot script and getting to know showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, partly through his friendship with actor Amanda Peet, Benioff’s wife.

"David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] are incapable of doing [fantasy tropes]; they’re too good. I told them that I love turning people’s expectations on their heads. You overcome stereotypes when people least expect it. You do it quietly. You don’t do it through a bullhorn. And I feel like that’s what they were doing with Tyrion. In another show it would be focused on the people on the throne looking down on me."

This feels like a lesson in opening yourself up to opportunities that may not seem to be your cup of tea. If Dinklage hadn’t given the role a chance, we may have had a completely different version of Tyrion Lannister on our hands, and that’s a world I don’t want to live in.

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h/t Looper