Peter Dinklage is an American actor and producer that has earned critical acclaim for portraying Tyrion Lannister on the ultra-popular series “Game of Thrones.”

For playing Tyrion, Dinklage won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series four times.

The star also took home a Golden Globe Award in 2011 and a Screen Actors Guild Award in 2020 for his performance.

Dinklage started his acting career in 1995 with the film “Living in Oblivion” alongside Steve Buscemi.

His role was that of a frustrated actor with dwarfism that longed for diverse roles instead of being typecast. Dinklage’s performance was well-received by critics, but the actor still struggled to find an agent. It was thanks to a recommendation from Buscemi to director Alexandre Rockwell that he was able to land a role in the comedy “13 Moons.”

Now that Dinklage is a household name due to the massive success of “Game of Thrones,” he is able to pursue projects that he is passionate about. In 2018, he starred as  Cyrano in the stage musical adaptation of “Cyrano de Bergerac.” The adaptation was written by his wife Erica Schmidt and featured music by The National.

Dinklage and Schmidt have been married since 2005. They share two children but are very private about their personal lives. Their oldest child was born in 2011, and their second child followed in 2017. The happy couple really enjoyed getting the chance to work together and did so again when they made “Cyrano” into a film in 2021. Keep reading to learn more about Dinklage and to hear what he has to say about the topic of love.

 Peter Dinklage (2021), (Tristan Fewings/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures & Universal Picture via Getty Images)

Dinklage is proud of the representation he is able to provide but has made a point not to put himself in the position of spokesperson for people with Dwarfism. “I never want to put myself in front of the work, and I never will. But if I’ve done my job and inspired change, then great. I read a lot of scripts where the height is the only characteristic of the character, but that’s not who I am,” he said. “It’s part of who I am, but I don’t go around thinking about it all day long. And if it doesn’t define me, why should it define a character? That’s just bad writing.”

One of Dinklage’s more complex characters was that of Cyrano. The actor couldn’t help but gush about his talented wife while discussing the play and film. “Erica Schmidt, our brilliant adapter and screenwriter, was commissioned to write a stage version of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac,’” Dinklage said. “But the original is quite long, and it was written 120 years ago when people didn’t have the internet and didn’t mind how long they spent in the theater. We’re more distracted now. Erica stripped it down to its bare essentials, took the monologues about love and turned them into love songs.”

Dinklage admitted that he is a bit biased because Schmidt is his wife, but the star thinks incredibly highly of her. “Yes, she’s my partner in love,” he added. “We’ve worked together on a number of things before. I love working with her. I hope she can say the same about me. It’s difficult being married to an actor, I know.”

 Peter Dinklage, Erica Schmidt (2013), (Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic/Getty Images)

There were a number of things that Dinklage had in common with Cyrano, and one of them was struggling with self-worth. “A lot of people think my height is the reason Cyrano is insecure about showing his love to Roxanne, but it really isn’t,” he explained. “It’s more universal than a nose or whether someone is shorter than someone else. It’s that feeling we have of being unworthy of love and insecure about who we are.”

Speaking with The Times, Dinklage shared that he used to struggle with insecurity but now is able to find self-worth in the notoriety he has gained as an actor. “Being my size, I get second looks quite often. My whole life I’ve had stares. Now there’s an ownership to someone looking at me or approaching me. It’s because of something positive,” he said.

Now, Dinklage is landing more and more leading roles and it has challenged the way Hollywood perceives beauty standards. He shared, “We’ve been stuck with this stereotype of a leading man and it’s healthy to open that up. Love life is not the domain of pretty people — everybody has a love life.”

Dinklage’s own love life is filled with romance. He and his wife had a memorable first meeting and he recalled it in an interview with the New York Times. “It was like something out of a beautiful, fantastical, end-of-the-world, crazy, romantic movie,” he said fondly.

The actor added: “If anybody’s been lucky enough to experience love, it just grabs hold of you. You don’t control how you feel, but you can choose what to do with it.”

 Peter Dinklage (2018), (Desiree Navarro/Getty Images)

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