Power-house American actor Peter Dinklage brought the role of beloved character Tyrion Lannister to life in the critically acclaimed TV show ‘Game of Thrones’. Did he win an Emmy for his stand-out role?
Peter Dinklage has won multiple Emmy awards during his nine year stay with ‘Game of Thrones’. He has been nominated a total of eight times for his performances on the show, winning four of those eight nominations.
Knowing of Dinklage’s unique personality and reluctance to accept stereotypical roles, the faith the show runners had in him to bring the core aspects of the character to life was not misplaced. He was their first choice for the role and vividly portrayed the complex character as expected, garnering a multitude of awards and the love of fans.
Dinklage Almost Refused the Role
The show runners for ‘Game of Thrones’, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, were careful when first approaching Dinklage for the role. Dinklage had long been known to refuse roles that typecast him based around his dwarfism. He touched on this briefly in an AMA that he conducted on Reddit, stating that he didn’t want a role that would involve “long beard and pointy shoes”, pointing towards his dislike of being handed flat or uninteresting stereotypical characters based on his height.
His skepticism wasn’t solely reserved for the fantasy genre. Ever since the beginning of his career, Dinklage was a man that was prepared to refuse a role, no matter how desperate he was. Any role that made light of his dwarfism, he would almost immediately refuse.
Role Choice Integrity
The fact that Dinklage wasn’t prepared to break his own code when it came to the kinds of roles that he was prepared to accept meant that he would spend a lot of time struggling to make ends meet, as he searched for a role that would defy the stereotypes expected of him.
Aside from a few minor roles, one of which was notable for being alongside fellow actor Steve Buscemi, Dinklage would have trouble finding both an agent and major parts in any other movies.
Eventually, however, this unwillingness to bow to what was expected of him would lead him to what would be a defining moment in his career, a role in the movie ‘The Station Agent’. In this movie, Dinklage would play the part of Finbar McBride, a role in which he would finally get to be the star of the show, portraying an interesting and nuanced character.
The film was incredibly well received, with high praise from critics and a selection of award nominations and wins to boot. The performance of Dinklage in particular was showered in glowing reviews about the way he portrayed his character.
Accepting His Role as Tyrion Lannister
Many of the reasons for Dinklage performing so well in the role of Tyrion Lannister were the same as the reasons that he excelled in ‘The Station Agent’. A complex, human character, complete with a wide range of emotions and foibles that would run the gamut of the emotional spectrum.
Aside from the initial concern about having to deal with a stereotypical character that would be uninteresting for him to play, he also had some hesitation about the fantastical nature of the world that the show would take place in. He had already had some experience with the fantasy genre, in ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ and was wary about doing so again. He was reassured by Benioff and Weiss that this would be “a different kind of fantasy”.
Although the character was already popular among fans of the novels, Dinklage was completely unaware of this, simply thinking that it seemed like an interesting character to play. The performance that would earn him so much critical acclaim would go on to not only truly define the character, but also the show, with some critics even claiming that they felt the show “belonged” to his character, with the majority of the scene-stealing moments coming from Dinklage.
Grammy and Other Awards
Aside from the multiple Grammy awards that Dinklage won for his role on the show, there have been multiple other organizations that have both nominated and awarded him for his performance. Most notably was the Golden Globe win, which he won in the same year that he won his first Grammy, marking the actor as one of the cornerstones of the already incredibly popular show, all on the first year of the show’s almost decade-long run.