Peter Dinklage on His Brutal Western — and Why He Still Loves the ‘Game of Thrones’ Finale

As Game of Thrones‘ Tyrion Lannister, Peter Dinklage survived various near-death experiences almost exclusively via his wits — but in his new movie, the enjoyably dark Western The Thicket, he plays Reginald Jones, a bounty hunter who’s a lot less verbal, and a lot more comfortable wielding a knife. Juliette Lewis gives an equally memorable performance as the movie’s villain, a scarred, brutal criminal originally written as a man in Joe Lansdale’s 2013 novel. Metallica‘s James Hetfield also pops up in a smaller role, looking like he was born for the setting. Dinklage recently called up Rolling Stone to talk about the new movie — which he’s been pushing to get made for a full decade — the state of Hollywood, the legacy of Game of Thrones, and more. (The Thicket is in some theaters now, and will eventually stream on Tubi.)

People have been calling The Thicket a “passion project,” which sometimes implies that something is going to be some kind of vanity-project disaster.
[Laughs.] I don’t know who came up with “passion project,” but it’s basically an actor who’s been with a project for a while. The term itself is definitely a setup for disaster.

But in this particular case it happens to be an excellent movie, an old-fashioned movie in the best way,
Westerns are funny because especially in America, we have this idea of genres — horror movies, Westerns — and they have to be a certain thing. It’s like, are we following the formula of Western movies, or what actually happened in the West? Clint Eastwood, or John Wayne in The Searchers — great movies. But did they create what it is, or how much did they draw upon the history of what actually the West was? It’s a really fascinating thing. That sort of frontier, outlaw lawlessness and all of that, I’m sure existed. But the cliches perhaps didn’t. Movie-makers have put these in there. And now, as an audience, we expect them. What I liked about Joe Lansdale’s book is that I’d never really read characters like this before in this genre.

Did you just happen to stumble upon this novel that had this perfect part for you, a fascinating outlaw who happens to be a guy your size?
Somebody referred it to my producing partner, David Ginsberg. He sent it to me. It’s a great book, but selfishly,  as an actor, I focused on you-know-who, and was like, “Oh, I really want to play that part. So let’s get a great screen adaptation going and start putting the pieces together” — probably motivated by the selfish actor side of me, for sure. I never took a crack at a Western. I always wanted to. I love them. And it took a while. They all take a long time. Covid shut us down for a while. It’s hard to raise the financing if you’re not in a superhero costume. It’s not a cynical thing — it’s just the reality of what it is. It’s such a crapshoot, and the market is changing now and theaters are closing. It’s a riskier environment. It’s more risk-averse, actually. But I found this company, Tubi, and they came to the rescue.

You said it was the idea of the toughness that Jones had to have that attracted you, imagining what it would be like.
As actors, we have our creature comforts. We have our beds, our kitchens filled with food, and our devices to watch. Nobody had that in the old West. They just had to survive day to day. People died young. It sounds weird, but I like the idea of, who would I be 150 years ago? Someone my size? I have my modern ways of surviving, in terms of people and what I get thrown at me. We seem to feel like we’re in a more enlightened time these days, but we aren’t — people have a common reaction to someone different And what I thought was interesting is 150 years ago, before political correctness, a guy like Reginald Jones, how tough would his skin be? What would he have to do? He’d have to have a really tough skin, and know how to figure out an exit strategy. I love that he’s not, like, a wordsmith. He just knows what needs to be done.

Did you find any unexpected emotional hangover from a day of shooting where you had to be essentially torturing someone? Did that get to you at all?
The environment of the movies is such where the guy you’re torturing, in between takes, you’re talking about the weather and making jokes. In a torture scene like that, you can’t really go Method, because then you’re just fucked. It’s not a healthy environment to be Method. I’ve been accused by people close to me that I am Method. I do get a little deep into it, but something like that, you have to make sure everybody’s safe and the hammer’s not hitting anything. [Laughs.]

You only have the one scene with Juliette Lewis, who plays the villain, and it almost reminded me of the Heat sit down between Pacino and DeNiro.
Thanks! That’s a good parallel. I’m working with Pacino right now, and I’m in L.A. I haven’t talked to him about it, but I remember when that movie came out it was like, “How did they get those two in a room together? I heard they filmed them separately!” It was too good to be true. I remember that was a huge rumor. [Laughs.] I think if I was De Niro, I’d wanna work with Pacino and vice versa. I don’t think there’s any old beef between those guys. It’s cool because it’s a storm at a moment when it’s really calm. And it’s the two central forces that are combating each other. In this case, she doesn’t know who I am, but I know who she is. I have that advantage, but I don’t have a gun on me and I don’t pose a threat to her. We have a commonality, like all great villains and heroes. If that’s what I am, a hero, I don’t know. It’s the Batman syndrome. They know how to dabble in the dark arts as well. And because she’s, like my character, unique-looking, there’s that commonality.

When there’s that unusual weight on a single scene, do you end up doing a million takes? Or do you just have to treat it like any other scene?
Juliette is phenomenal. So it’s much easier. We only did a few takes. We didn’t have time to do more. Indie film! I love doing just a few takes and moving on. I know some great directors who do a lot of takes. My favorite, Stanley Kubrick, used to do that. There’s a method to that as well. 

You just reminded me of when Harvey Keitel supposedly stormed off set during Eyes Wide Shut because Kubrick made him walk through a door a hundred times or whatever.
[Laughs.] I know, man. Harvey Keitel, he’s a great actor. I don’t know what he was going through, but it’d be hard for me to walk off a Stanley Kubrick movie! He must have put everybody through it. I know there’s stories, but, you just gotta think, “I’m in a Kubrick movie, I’m in a Kubrick movie. It’s all gonna work out.” And I love Eyes Wide Shut.

As you said, James Hetfield really does have a face for Westerns. It feels so right to have him wield a gun in that setting.
He’s big, he’s tall. He’s a presence. He’s an authority figure in terms of his physical stature and his grizzled voice, the whole thing. Talk about a lifetime of experience that he brings to the table. And he was so nice, and it’s fun to pepper it with non-actors sometimes.

You bring so much training and experience to this, and then you have someone who usually does a whole different job coming to it. How does that dynamic work? Did you find yourself coaching him?
There’s no coaching! He was probably bored on set, ’cause there’s a lot of sitting around. That’s why we’re envious of musicians and painters — they can just keep going and play by themselves and not be reliant on all the crew and set preparations and all of that. So I’m sure he was bored, but he seemed to really engage everybody. He was super-nice, super-kind and super patient. David Bowie and Tom Waits are two of my favorite musician actors. I just thought Hetfield would be great in this world.

When you were on Kimmel the other day, you were still introduced with a mention of Game of Thrones.  Are you comfortable with that being attached to you perhaps permanently at this point?
When you do a Rolling Stone cover, you make your bed, man. [Laughs.] It would be very difficult if I wasn’t proud of that show, but I happen to be insanely proud of that show. I love that character. And I’m still good friends with and I love the creators, David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss]. It was about ten years of our lives from the first time they told me about it to when we wrapped the final season. I raised two kids part time over in Ireland. There’s no shame in that. There’s only pride. And it was eight seasons. So that’s 80 hours of me! Everybody globally, everybody got 80 hours of Dinklage … It’s bound to follow me around.

How anxiety-provoking was it to face the end of that show and to start plotting out a post-Thrones career?
I mean, it was sad, but I didn’t really have anxiety, because at that point we were all ready to move on. For any sort of creative type, especially with what we do, we want to mix it up. The good thing about that show was the actors had quite a bit of time off between seasons. It was like half the year with Thrones, half the year off. You could do other things on your time off, if you were lucky to be engaged in other creative things, which I chose to be. And then by the time it was done, you don’t want to overstay your welcome with anything — a party, a TV show. So I think it was really time. There are some people who probably wanted to keep going with it on the financial end of things, ’cause we were doing very well for HBO. But creatively, it was a good time for everybody to move on from it.

It’s been five years, and you’ve kept very busy. How does the way your career has been going in that time differ from what you expected five years ago? What’s surprised you, if anything?
I’m lucky enough to be taking it in the direction I want to be taking it in because I’m primarily producing all the stuff I’m in. And also producing stuff I’m not acting in. I’m lucky enough to be able to say no to certain things that just don’t sit right with me. That’s a very privileged position to be in. And I’m fortunate enough to be able to do that. I know there’s a lot of people who aren’t and need to pay the bills, and I understand and respect that way of seeing things. But for me personally, that’s what I’m trying to do. I have kids and I want them to be proud of the work I’ve done and not feel I’ve compromised myself in any way. And that’s what Game of Thrones, really both financially and artistically, allowed me to be able to say. So I’m very in debt to that show, because it did reach such a wide audience and it did allow someone like me to be seen on a very human level —  at least on the page. Whatever I did with it as a performance, I can’t speak to. But Dave and Dan, the writers of the show, gave me access to something I had rarely gotten access to before. And I think that maybe, hopefully, perhaps reconfigured the way people saw someone like me.

For the actors I’ve spoken to recently, it continues to be a weird time for the business. There’s a lot of anxiety, even among big names. Does managing to get a movie like The Thicket made give you a little bit more optimism about the state of things?
Yeah, I hope so. I’m getting older now. I can’t steer the collective social zeitgeist of what people like. I think there’s a part of the entertainment business where their responsibility is to hopefully steer people’s taste a little bit. You just gotta be responsible for what you’re putting out there to be consumed by the public and the entertainment business. And yeah, I’m nervous, but my profession has always been [like this]. I never know when my next job is coming or where it’s coming from. I know it’s scary out there for everybody in terms of holding onto your jobs and being happy with your jobs. But we have gigs where it’s really scary because you never know when the next gig is coming. And sometimes it comes in waves and you unfortunately have to choose between things that you love equally.

I don’t try and get too cynical about the state of the business because people will always need entertainment. They have for hundreds of years — they want to get out of the cold, or in out of the heat into these air-conditioned theaters, be entertained and forget their lives for a moment. And laugh or dwell in the misery of others. [Laughs.] I don’t get creeped out by CGI or AI or anything like that. I mean, I’m older, I’m sort of a Luddite, but we created these things. Just like we created a hammer. You can either build a house with a hammer or kill somebody with a hammer. It’s what you choose to do with the tools. I don’t see any sort of Blade Runner future where the machines are going to take over, like Terminator-style. They’re great tools. We just need to use them wisely.

There is also this trend where films are not getting released for a tax write-off. You starred in a Toxic Avenger remake that seems to be in limbo after getting a great film-festival reception — that’s not going to end up unreleased, is it?
Gosh, I hope not. It’s such a great movie. I saw a rough cut of it. I absolutely loved it. It’s so original, even though it’s a spin on an old Eighties cult movie. It’s so much fun and it’s over-the-top violence. Everybody that’s seen it, like the festival in Austin, Texas, all freaked out for it. They loved it. It’s out of my hands. It’s with the companies and what they choose to do with it.  You work so hard on something, especially with good friends, and you don’t know what the fate of it’s gonna be. But I guess you just gotta move on. Hopefully it will be released. I hope so. Because it’s really fun, people really like it. Speaking of AI, the hardest thing is if it’s starting to put people out of work, like makeup and hair people. Because that’s my favorite stuff, to sit in the chair and transform into somebody else, practically. And Toxic Avenger is a lot of that. It’s primarily that.

On The Thicket, shooting on location instead of using CGI meant it was so cold you had to slather your body in Vaseline, right?
Yeah, man, you have to coat yourself with some sort of weird Canadian version of cold cream and Vaseline. Your body eventually acclimates,  but yeah, you need that stuff or your whole face just cracks open. It’s crazy. But yeah, I just love the prosthetic stuff over anything else. CGI is great for backdrops and dragons, but it’s hard to CGI a dog. You know what a dog looks like. It looks fake.

You’ve joked about Game of Thrones fans needing to move on from the finale, but in 2021, you managed to make fans mad all over again by saying you liked the final season and the ending. So I guess they’re not moving on.
No, but that’s the thing. Again, just my opinion. I like the finale! You don’t have to agree with me. How about if I said like, “Yeah, I agree. I hated the finale. The whole last season was horrible”?  I mean, that would sit much worse than if I said I loved it, which I did. I can’t speak for anybody else’s opinion, and that’s what makes what we do fun, because everybody does have a difference of opinion and everybody gets to write about it and chat about it and drink over it and argue about it. It’s great. I mean, I think it means you’re doing something right. It’s like an old Irish way of looking at the world. There’s something wrong if everything’s OK. [Laughs.]

Well, for what it’s worth, Taylor Swift was a huge fan of the show, and she told me she liked the final season.
There we go. I knew I loved her!

There was that moment at the very end, where you and the rest of the ruling council laugh at the idea of democracy — more than one person actually thought that was the authorial point of view, that the showrunners were mocking democracy. I couldn’t believe that reaction.
Yeah, no. By the way, that was all filmed after Trump was elected. We were on set in Spain when Trump was elected. We were saying those lines and I was like, “Holy smokes. Yikes.”

But still, I assume you’d like to express your support for democracy.
[Laughs.] Yes, indeed. Whether it works or not, the idea of it is still very strong and should be respected.

From Rolling Stone US.