Years before he delivered suave one-liners and took revenge on multiple members of his family as Tyrion Lannister in the HBO show Game of Thrones, Dinklage got a starring role in Tom DiCillio’s 1995 Sundance hit Living in Oblivion.
Shot in 16 days, the semi-autobiographical film is based on DiCillio’s experiences of working on his debut, Johnny Suede (1991), starring Brad Pitt and Catherine Keener. Dinklage is called on to play a token dwarf in a dream sequence, and he expresses his disgust at being cast only because of his size. “Why does my character have to be a dwarf?” his character Tito asks the beleaguered filmmaker Nick Reve (Steve Buscemi).
In an interview from 2007, the actor spoke about his first role. “That was my first film,” he told AV Club. “I was working an office job at the time, and I get a call from this guy named Tom, and I thought it was one of my friends playing a practical joke on me… this guy says, ‘Hi, my name is Tom DiCillo, and I was wondering if you could come in and do a read for me for this movie I’m directing called Living In Oblivion.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll be there tomorrow,’ then some expletive or something, and I hung up on him. About five minutes later, he calls back and he’s like, ‘Um, no, it’s really-hi, my name is Tom and, uh, I’m really making this movie.’”
There have been other times in Dinklage’s film career where his roles have dealt with the idea of being a little person, including his breakthrough The Station Agent (2003), directed by Tom McCarthy.
In a crucial sequence in The Station Agent, Dinklage’s Finbar McBride gets frustrated at the giggling and staring inhabitants of the small town he has moved to. He gets up on the bar counter and yells, “Here I am! Take a look.” In an earlier scene, he tells a friend who asks him why he has retired at a young age, “Dwarfs retire early. Common fact.”
Dinkgale also starred in Matthew Bright’s Tiptoes (2003), starring Matthew McConaughey and Kate Beckinsale. The film is about the only normal-sized person in a family of dwarfs, one of whom is played by Gary Oldman. In a blog titled “Great Acting in Bad Films”, British film critic Mark Kermode recalls the director describing it to him “in very un-PC terms” as “the dwarf love story movie”.
In his 2012 commencement speech at Bennington College, Dinkgale tells the class of graduating students, “Don’t bother telling the world you are ready. Show it. Do it.”
