At twilight on Tenth Avenue, the sidewalks of lower Chelsea, in the island kingdom of Manhattan, are thronged with creatures of every ilk—dewy working girls and snugly tailored metro boys, polyethnic couples and Euro-tourons; a burly man in a white apron splattered with blood; a fashionista pushing a rack of clothes; a bodybuilder leashed to a pug. Cars honk, buses whoosh, the sun setting over the Hudson River casts an energetic glow.
Peter Dinklage is sitting by a window in one of his favorite restaurants, facing northward, against the tide of the passing show. The overhead lights are bright; a jazzy soundtrack noodles through the inner atmosphere, which smells deliciously of baking bread. Few patrons are in evidence; the kitchen is shut down, retooling for dinner. He requested a seat in the back, but the staff is being fed. That he’s lived in this neighborhood a while now makes him a regular. That he’s the Emmy- and Golden-Globe-winning star of HBO’s popular Game of Thrones entitles him to this primo spot; it didn’t seem right to turn it down.
Dinklage’s thick and longish hair is stuffed beneath a fuzz-balled knit cap. He sports his usual black jeans and T-shirt and James Perse hoodie, a brand he says is known for roomier hoods. Though at four feet six he is eleven inches shorter than me, he sits as if he were taller; I have to look up slightly to meet his blue-gray eyes, which seem more reflective of what’s going on outside himself than of what’s happening within. The drooping set of his eyes makes him look a bit sad, even as he’s laughing. His heavy brow appears to be permanently furrowed in a state of wariness; he is indeed a veteran of life’s odd possibilities, starting with the one-in-twenty-five-thousand chance that he’d be born with achondroplasia—a genetic disorder that causes abnormalities in bone formation. At one point, my shin makes contact beneath the table with the tip of his not-unlarge Chelsea boot, the style favored by the Beatles. I do not take the opportunity to observe the distance between the sole and the floor.
A few days hence, engaged in the delicate task of fact-checking his height, I will thoughtlessly blurt the line that was always told to me, something from Abraham Lincoln about sufficient leg length being defined by one’s ability to reach the ground.
“Um, how tall was Lincoln?” he asks pointedly.
I don’t know, six something? He had gigantism.
“Yeah? Well, he’s a much more important figure in history and humanity than I am. But we don’t know how tall he was exactly, do we?”
I’m sure you can Google it.
“I read somewhere that Thomas Jefferson had a really squeaky, high-pitched voice.”
And Washington had wooden teeth, right?
“Ha. Those guys wouldn’t have survived today’s world. A president with a squeaky voice? No way.”
Seated as we are, in a brightly lit room beside a large window, with darkness gathering outside, there is created, I suppose, an effect similar to that of a department-store window display. People pass and stare, do double takes, snap cellies. Beyond the usual celebrity hubbub, there is something more: looks of genuine wonderment. Spontaneous delighted laughter.
Since wrapping season four of Thrones, an eventful one for his much beloved character, Tyrion Lannister, Dinklage has been home in New York for a month. Hitting the gym, working on a screenplay and producing a film, walking his hundred-pound lab-Great-Dane-pointer mix, running a lot of errands, taking his turn as at-home parent to his two-year-old daughter while his wife, Erica Schmidt, directs a pair of plays back-to-back. After more than two decades and eight different apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan, “I’m getting to that age where I love New York City, but I don’t call it a vacation anymore. It sort of drives me crazy.” He’s antsy to get back to their house north of the city. Hoofing it across the urban landscape, hailing cabs, just buying dog food—everywhere he goes he causes a bit of a stir. Of course, it’s pretty much been that way his entire life. Celebrity has only multiplied the effect. Even when he’s not recognized, he’s noticed. One small consolation: After three decades of stage work and more than thirty movies—including a role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, coming in May—and a handful of awards, nobody confuses him anymore with Mini Me.
Now a woman is standing just outside the window holding a toddler with a runny nose. She’s speaking animatedly into the child’s ear, kissing her rosy cheek, pointing at Dinklage rather like a mother at the zoo. Look dear, it’s Trumpkin from Narnia!
This he can’t ignore.
He smiles overlarge and issues a spoofy royal wave.
“Hellooo,” he calls, at once sardonic and resigned. His voice is a beautiful deep baritone, a woodwind sound that resonates in the airspace around our two-top. “Helloo. Hellooo-oooo.” You must have some interesting encounters on the street, I say, attempting to commiserate.
He rests his cheeks in his not-unlarge hands and shakes his head. “Sometimes the encounters can be meaningful,” he offers, trying a different spin.
He rubs his stubbled goatee. “One morning,” after his breakout role in The Station Agent (2003), “I was walking down Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. There was this guy on a motorcycle right in front of me—about as far away as that plant, maybe six feet? And he looked at me. He didn’t wave, but he looked at me, and then he pulled out into traffic and this car, like, boom—killed him instantly.”
And you were the last person he saw?
“Yes. I was the last person he saw on earth.”
And you connected with him.
“And I connected with him. And then he pulled out into traffic and boom. There was an old guy driving the car. I ran into this coffee shop that I’d been on my way to. They had somebody call an ambulance. And then I ran back outside to be with the guy, but he was already dead. I didn’t want to get too near him. The old guy had stopped and he was slowly getting out of his car. It was in the morning, so there was no one around, you know? This was in L. A., where nobody walks. It was empty. So there was this quiet moment where it was like I was the only person in the world who knew this guy was dead. And I was there looking at him, you know, in those moments of calm after something horrible happens, the calm before the melee starts, before the ambulances and the cops arrive and it becomes a scene. There was that moment when I was with him.”
He raises his photogenic chin, contemplating the immediate heavens, the vicissitudes of fate, his face turned away from the window. I can’t help but think of Tyrion Lannister delivering one of his rich monologues, a conflicted modern thinker among the primitives, a pragmatist with a deep well of melancholy.
“There’s such a difference with dying,” Dinklage says. “You can have somebody who is really sick for a long time. Like, my father had cancer for many years and he passed away. He was too young. He was in his seventies, which is too young. But there’s something different between an older person dying and this guy. He was probably about twenty-five. He’d probably just had breakfast at the same place I was headed. And then he died. It’s like, he was robbed.”
We sit for a few moments, sipping our coffees. He eats some cheese and apple off the plate but skips the bread. The passing show continues past.
Then it pops into my head, so I ask: Do you think you might have distracted him?
Dinklage’s eyes saucer. His face contorts into a hideous mask.
“No, no, no, no!” he cries, raising his hands defensively, as if to fend off the notion. “No! I never felt like that! NOT AT ALL.”
Just wondered, you know, given the—
“Oh, my God! Fuck you. How dare—Oh, Mike. I never thought of that before. This was supposed to be a story about how I actually connected with a stranger. Oh, fuck. Oh, man. Dude!”
I’m so sorry. It just seemed—
“It’s over. This is over! I’m gonna have nightmares tonight. I’m Catholic, remember?”
Four guys hunkered in a half-round leather banquette on a Friday night in Greenwich Village.
“You wanna talk about the Womfy?” Dinklage asks...
Source