Game of Thrones vet Peter Dinklage will play a kindly singing goat man in Wicked
Peter Dinklage, who has experience with musicals like Cyrano, will play Doctor Dillamond opposite Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in the upcoming Wicked movie.
By Dan Selcke
The other day at CinemaCon, we learned of a new addition to the cast of Wicked, the movie adaptation of the hugely popular Broadway musical, which is based on a book by Gregory Maguire, which is a reworking of The Wizard of Oz. You gotta down the rabbit hole on this one. Anyway, none other than Peter Dinklage, famous for playing Tyrion Lannister on Game of Thrones, will be in the movie, which stars Cynthia Eviron as Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West; and Ariana Grande as her best frenemy Glinda, the future Good Witch of the North.
That's the gimmick of Wicked, if you didn't know; the story follows Elphaba and Glinda back during their days at university, when they were unwilling roommates who eventually become best friends. “So much happened before Dorothy dropped in,” goes the famous tagline. Did it ever. Dinklage will play Doctor Dillamond, a professor to whom young Elphaba takes a liking.
Doctor Dillamond is also, as it happens, a talking goat man. In Wicked lore, talking animals like Dillamond are discriminated against, and some are devolving back to their more animalistic selves. Dillamond sings about this in the song "Something Bad."
Dinklage has some experience with musical theater, playing the title role in the musical Cyrano onstage before reprising it in the 2021 musical. Here's a sampling of his pipes:
I wouldn't call Dinklage a spectacular vocalist, but "Something Bad" is more of a character song, so I'm sure he'll be fine. He doesn't have to sing "Defying Gravity" or anything.
In addition to Eviro, Grande and Dinklage, the Wicked movie also stars Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Bailey, and Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard of Oz himself. “We dreamed very, very, very big forWicked," director Jon Chu said at CinemaCon, according to The A.V. Club. "We wanted to honor the source material. But we also wanted to create a new world of its own — a magical land full of sights and sounds that will astonish.”
They dreamed so big that they're dividing Wicked into two movies! The first comes out on November 27 of this year, while Wicked: Part Two is penciled in for November 26, 2025. I'm a musical fan, so I want to see this, but breaking it up into two movies is giving me pause. I've sat and watched Wicked on stage, so I know you can do it in one sitting. And I know you know that, Jon Chu and Universal Pictures. So we'll see how things shake out.
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