Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei star in She Came to Me
If his new movie is like the great screwball comedies, says Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage, ‘we’ve done our job right’.
In Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage was one of the standouts, if not the standout, as he brought a sense of humour to his role as lusty, scheming nobleman Tyrion Lannister in no fewer than 67 episodes – five more than any other actor in the landmark series.
“Humour was what that show kind of needed,” Dinklage says. “And that was probably why people liked that character so much. It was a relief from all the pressure.”
Humour comes easily to the sharp and frequently acerbic Dinklage, 53, who admits he was funny from an early age.
“I just had it – I used to use it to attract the opposite sex,” he says.
“If you’re not six foot three and chiselled, you’ve got to have other tools at your disposal. But that’s just an insecurity when you’re young. Now I just love making people laugh. I love making my kids laugh. It’s my favourite thing in the world. And they’re a tough audience.
“But I don’t know where it comes from; maybe it’s a defence mechanism. I clearly have issues. So I use it as another wall to break down, to make people relaxed. It’s defensive and also a social lubricant. Whatever it is, funny people aren’t necessarily happy people. Just put it that way.”
The actor now stars in the romantic comedy She Came to Me, in which he plays Steven, an opera composer with writer’s block. Anne Hathaway plays Patricia, his former therapist and now wife, who suggests he get out of their Brooklyn brownstone and maybe inspiration will come. Inspiration comes in the form of Marisa Tomei, a tugboat captain Steven meets at a bar and falls for.
The film, which had its world premiere at the Berlin film festival last year, is written and directed by Rebecca Miller – daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath, and wife of retired actor Daniel Day-Lewis – who previously directed Greta Gerwig in Maggie’s Plan (2015) and Robin Wright in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009).
Dinklage says he is not usually asked to be the romantic lead in a film.
“Harrison Ford, he’s like the greatest actor who happens to play the romantic leading man all the time and he’s so good at it,” he says. “As was Cary Grant, who could do anything. But if She Came to Me could be anything like those famous screwball comedies – Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels and Palm Beach Story – we’ve done our job right.”
Still, he was up for the challenge and brought his own distinctive style to the role.
“It’s fun playing a character that things happen to and who is the receptacle of all the craziness around him,” he says.
“I don’t think my character understands that he’s in anything funny. But a serious character falling into water and then composing in his head underwater – that’s inherently funny. Sometimes if you play it more as a drama, it’ll even be funnier.”
He likes the rhythm of Miller’s dialogue: “You sort of discover it as you read it and when you’re on the set with the other actors, it’s lovely to hear how people talk – not even what they’re saying but how they relate to each other.”
Miller says Dinklage gives a plausible performance as a composer in this movie about music and love.
“I don’t know if it’s because his brother is a professional musician, but Peter is just completely believable,” she says.
“What he does is really hard, you know. In the script there was all that stuff about how he uses his hands and how he externalises all his anxiety through his body. I just loved how he did that.”
Miller’s casting of Dinklage and Tomei (a three-time Oscar nominee and a winner for My Cousin Vinny) proved to be inspired.
“I’d never seen them in a room together but I hoped they would have great chemistry,” Miller says.
“Just watching them in the bar is for me a masterclass in acting, because they both really created characters that were utterly distinct from who they are as people.
“As actors they have the capacity to be really funny and emotionally real at the same time. They’re playing it in a serious way, but they understand the timing, and they understand what needs to happen in the scene to make it work.”
It’s hard not to fall in love with Tomei’s rough-around-the edges Katrina as Dinklage’s Steven does.
“Rebecca wanted us to be as real as possible,” Tomei says. “But the tugboat women I met wore more makeup than my character did. It just read more authentic to be raw.”
The Brooklyn-born actor relished the chance to pilot the tugboat. “There were a lot of opportunities to be on that expanse of water that we love so much in New York,” Tomei says. “And that’s a really unusual opportunity.”
Miller managed to entice Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa to write a song, Addicted to Romance, for the film; it was nominated for a Golden Globe.
(Springsteen and wife Scialfa were in the front row at the recent awards ceremony. When Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos accepted the award for best motion picture, musical or comedy, and rhapsodised in his speech about Springsteen, his childhood hero, the rest of us were happy to see the musician looking fighting fit after his recent poor health and cancelled concerts.)
How did Miller get Springsteen involved? “I was told he’s not writing at the moment and that there’s no way he’s going to write an original song,” she says.
“So I ended up sending him the film, and I know him and Patti well enough for them to call me. And they just went nuts for it. He called me and he said, ‘Let me see if anything comes to me.’
“Ultimately, he was inspired by this movie about inspiration to write the song – which is like a classic.”
Hathaway had been developing the film with Miller over many years and takes a producer credit.
“I was the first one cast and I supported Rebecca through a lot of the process,” the actor says.
“I believe in her so much. I actually had first auditioned for Rebecca when I was a teenager and I remember leaving the room feeling a sense of destiny. This script came and touched my heart so deeply. It’s rare to find something so heartfelt, brave and risky, all at the same time.”
She likes to experiment with her choice of film projects. “I am drawn to things that I’m not entirely sure if they’re going to work,” Hathaway says. “I am drawn to things that try to blend tones – not all the time, but to stories that resonate with me in a certain way.” An appealing aspect of She Came to Me is that it “shows three very different women being themselves”, she says.
Hathaway’s character, Patricia, has a secret spirituality that is taking over her life while her husband has no idea.
“She really wants to be of service (to God) in the purest way,” she says. “She can understand it. She really isn’t that interested in having a personality. And that to me was very, very interesting because that is so at odds with the modern world and the way we’re all expected to be so defined.”
Had Hathaway ever wanted to be a nun, which seems where Patricia is heading? “Without going into specifics, yes, when I was younger, and to be closer to God,” she says. She prepared for the film “by watching every nun movie I could find. I found a lot of inspiration from Viridiana,” she says of the Mexican classic.
The 41-year-old Oscar winner (for best supporting actress in Les Miserables in 2013, opposite Hugh Jackman) likes to perform in big Hollywood productions as well as in smaller films.
“Sometimes a big studio will spend $200m on a film, but sometimes you just want to tell a story about human beings exploring what love means,” she says. “And it is so hard to get money for a film about that.
“My first film, The Princess Diaries, was a huge commercial success. It was a feel-good comedy and I loved making it. I love existing in those films. And then I got to be in Brokeback Mountain, which was a much smaller film, more what we would describe as art house. And then I got to be in The Devil Wears Prada, another crowd pleaser. And then I was in Rachel Getting Married, which was again smaller and is one of my favourite American films that’s ever been made.”
She received her sole best actress Oscar nomination in 2009 for Rachel Getting Married (2008), directed by Jonathan Demme.
Hathaway has two young children, so it’s no surprise that she will be seen soon in a Warner Bros movie of Sesame Street. She also has some independent films coming up, including a gritty psychological thriller, Mothers’ Instinct, with Jessica Chastain.
Given that Hathaway rocketed to fame at a young age – she was 18 when she made The Princess Diaries – it’s interesting to ask where she feels she stands in the scheme of things now.
“I probably feel more like a teenager than I did when I actually was a teenager,” she says with a smile. “Because when I was a teenager, I was really career-oriented, whereas right now I feel like I’m more life-oriented. Or maybe I’m seeking harmony between the two.”
She Came to Me is available on streaming platforms including Prime Video.
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