No actor makes a more bravura entrance on screen this awards season than Peter Dinklage in Cyrano. Preceded by his commanding voice, which pricks the ego of a pompous stage actor, Dinklage’s soldier and poet captivates the audience at an Enlightenment-era playhouse, takes back the stage, verbally dismisses a sneering interloper who brings up his short stature, and then gracefully dispatches a physical threat.
It’s the 17th century version of a literary superhero, and the camera follows every step of the American actor’s show-stopping appearance – at turns droll, dashing, and damning – with rapt attention. Dinklage’s introduction sets up a ravishing take on the musical drama that is obsessed with love, rich of timbre and captivated by words. It begs the question: was there anything the filmmakers didn’t expect him to master for this role?
Peter Dinklage stars as the love-lorn Cyrano. It is the third time he has played the role.
“I don’t jump out of an airplane. How’s that?” Dinklage drily jokes, settling in for the first interview of the day at a London hotel. “I love taking on new challenges and filmmaking at the end of the day should be exciting, it should be fun, no matter how many hours you work that day. I enjoy having the satisfaction of going into something not knowing what the heck you’re doing, training for a month or so with an amazing stunt team, and coming out at the end of it able to sword fight a bit.”
Playing the title role in Cyrano is a welcome summation of Dinklage’s talents and the start of something new after the long-time supporting player found stardom on HBO’s fantasy hit Game of Thrones. The 52-year-old Dinklage essayed the rueful, cunning noble and adviser Tyrion Lannister between 2011 and 2019, delivering the show’s cornerstone performance and winning the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series a record four times. Viewers came for the CGI dragons, they stayed for Dinklage’s monologues.
Since Game of Thrones′ wonky final season concluded, no professional project has occupied more of Dinklage’s time than Cyrano. Even before he had the role it was part of his household, as Dinklage’s wife, playwright and stage director Erica Schmidt, was putting her mark on Edmond Rostand’s much-adapted 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. A love triangle written in verse, it’s a text so familiar the story is now archetypal.
Schmidt, who has been married to Dinklage since 2005, altered the play’s DNA by replacing the long spoken declarations with newly written songs, with the music commissioned from brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner, multi-instrumentalists with the alternative-rock band the National, while the lyrics were written by the acclaimed group’s frontman Matt Berninger and his wife, Carin Besser. Love’s great promise could now be borne by melodies.
Haley Bennett stars as Roxanne, who is wooed by Dinklage’s Cyrano posing as a young soldier called Christian.
But Schmidt also updated the role of Cyrano. Traditionally, the character is distinguished by his huge nose, which makes him reticent to reveal his feelings to Roxanne, the love of his life, and instead surreptitiously serve as the voice of the young man, Christian, that Roxanne is besotted with. With Dinklage as Cyrano, Schmidt saw that there was no need for ludicrous prosthetics. The military officer’s self-doubt would stem from his height, but the feelings of insecurity would be unadorned and universal.
“It’s such a beautiful piece, written over 120 years ago. I’m not the penultimate version of Cyrano – there’s probably a production going on somewhere right now and it will be mounted 100 years from now as well,” Dinklage says. “I love that, the continuum of these classic parts – like Hamlet – being done all the time with different versions of the same characters.”
Once Dinklage started reading for Schmidt the adaptation quickly took shape. Theatre workshops led to a 2018 production in Connecticut, where the Roxanne to Dinklage’s Cyrano was played by the American actor Haley Bennett. In 2019 the pair headlined a Broadway season, and in 2020 Bennett’s partner, the British filmmaker Joe Wright, signed on to direct a film adaptation with a script by Schmidt. The one thing everyone involved agreed on? Dinklage was meant to play Cyrano.
“It’s a huge compliment,” Dinklage says. “If you’re synonymous with a role you’ve played it means you’ve put the work in and something is working in viewers’ mind and that’s very kind of them. Although now that I’ve done Cyrano three times, I’m ready to move on to the next character for sure.”
As Tyrion Lannister, Dinklage was one of the breakout stars of Game of Thrones.
As he was with the celebrity that came with Game of Thrones, Dinklage is wary of praise. He unfailingly emphasises the collective nature of Cyrano’s various iterations, singling out department heads by name for their contributions. He’s always loved being part of an artistic group, whether it’s a troupe of stage actors exploring a text or the rock bands he fronted as a young man new to downtown New York 30 years ago – Dinklage has a scar above his right eye that he picked up while crowd-surfing at the legendary punk venue CBGBs.
“You go in there with some preconceived notions about who Cyrano is, but then you learn from the director and the other actors. It’s a collaboration and they inform so much of what your character is,” Dinklage says. “From the theatrical production to the film a lot has to change, given the nature of the different art forms, but the heart remained the same really. What Erica has created stayed the same no matter how many changes were made.”
While Schmidt brings cinematic elements to her stage productions, whether it’s falling rain or stylised fight sequences, a film from Joe Wright is an altogether more heightened visual proposition. The director of Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Hanna, and – yes – The Woman in the Window deploys the chorus as elegant enticement and then shoots an entire swordfight in a single take, with the kind of detailed combat choreography Jackie Chan would recognise.
“That’s what you want from your director,” Dinklage says. “He was inspired by Erica’s original theatre production, he saw what she was doing and made it his own, which is what filmmakers should do. It’s a director’s art form. He was so drawn to the stage version that he wanted to get closer to the actors, and that’s what film allows you to have with the intimacy.”
Dinklage with his wife Erica Schmidt, who directed him in the stage version of Cyrano, at the film’s London premiere. Credit: Getty Images
Working in a bubble during Europe’s COVID crisis, Wright took the cast and crew to the Mediterranean island of Sicily in Italy’s south, where the town of Noto supplied the gorgeous baroque architecture for the period setting and a blighted battlefield could be built on the slopes of Mount Etna, an active volcano. “It kept us all on our toes,” says Dinklage, who adds that the realism which Wright and the production team brought to the romantic valour and love-struck songs helped Cyrano stand out.
“It’s more a movie with songs than a musical. With a musical, you think of big production numbers with choruses and all of that Les Miserables style and West Side Story singing and dancing at the same time,” Dinklage says. “Those are a couple of my favourite shows and I love musicals, but we’re not doing that. Joe’s other films are about wearing your heart on your sleeve and it was just such a natural fit visually.”
So, if Dinklage is able to perform full-bodied songs whose composers include three members of the National, including the group’s singer, does that mean that in a pinch he could front the band as a kind of understudy if Berninger was unavailable?
“No! Matt has one of my favourite voices in rock. The only thing we have in common is a similar baritone register, but it stops there. He is phenomenal. I was a fan long before Erica started collaborating with them, but my trick was not to do an imitation of Matt,” Dinklage says. “We love to do that, as if we’re singing along to Prince or Aretha Franklin, but we don’t sound like them. The key is to sing from your heart and make it your own.”
While Cyrano has some time-honoured elements, including Ben Mendelsohn as the entitled Duke De Guiche, who is pressuring Roxanne to accept his marriage proposal by threatening the safety of Cyrano and her tongue-tied young suitor, Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr), the idea of Cyrano communicating to Roxanne through Christian is a form of catfishing. There’s also nothing playful about the story’s emotional weight – it’s genuine in expressing the desire to be loved, how it can elevate and fell you, and is shorn of cynicism.
“I guess I can say this, as I play the role, it is Cyrano’s fault. It’s not a blame game, but he made the choice to hide behind the profile of another man, he made the choice to be dishonest in love,” Dinklage says. “Love is the complete opposite of dishonesty – it’s nothing but honest. I think a lot of people are afraid to be too honest about who they are, afraid they’ll scare people away.
“Because of the pandemic globally we’re so kind of emotionally raw right now, all of us. We’re really taking into consideration now time spent with the person we’re living with or married to or dating – there’s nowhere to go but facing each other.
“We’re feeling exposed and vulnerable, physically obviously, but also emotionally and spiritually. What we’re doing with this movie is trying to help that with some songs and some resonance, so that the audience doesn’t have to feel alone right now because none of us are. Whatever we can do in the arts and filmmaking to make us feel like a community again, we’ll do it.”
Cyrano opens in cinemas on February 24.
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