While most people know him best for playing Tyrion Lannister on the HBO smash series Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage’s acting career spans more than two decades. His breakthrough came when he starred in the 2003 indie film The Station Agent, which earned him a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and an Independent Spirit Award nomination. Since then, he’s gone on to star in a long list of movies and TV shows. He’s taken home four Emmy Awards, one Golden Globe Award, and one SAG Award for his work on Game of Thrones. But when it comes to his personal life, the 52-year-old actor is notoriously private. Here’s everything we know about Peter Dinklage’s wife, Erica Schmidt.
Peter Dinklage And Erica Schmidt Have Been Married Since 2005
Not much is known about the courtship of Dinklage and Schmidt, as both take great pains to keep their relationship out of the public eye. But we do know that the couple tied the knot in 2005 and have two children together—one born in 2011 and one born in 2017.
We also know that Schmidt shares Dinklage’s love of acting and has her own successful career in the arts as a theater director. “She’s very inspiring. She’s definitely the artist of the family,” Dinklage said in a 2015 interview with the Guardian. “She loves theater. Unlike a lot of other people in our profession where film is the ultimate goal, theater is sacred to her. It’s not entertainment; it’s art.”
While we may not know much about their relationship, it’s obvious that Schmidt adores her husband. “Pete is an incredibly handsome, charming, funny guy,” Schmidt gushed in a rare interview with Rolling Stone back in 2012. “But what’s frustrating about it is that but when he does a magazine or something it’s like, ‘Isn’t it amazing he’s four foot five inches tall and he’s sexy?’ You know, that’s just who Pete is. And the rest of the world has to catch up.”
They Worked On ‘Cyrano’ Together
In addition to being a director, Schmidt is an accomplished playwright and screenwriter. In 2019, she adapted the classic French play Cyrano de Bergerac into an Off-Broadway musical starring Dinklage. The play, which was originally written in 1897, tells the story of a man who is afraid to profess his love to the woman of his dreams because he’s insecure about his large nose.
“It’s a fantastic piece of theater, the original. All the characters are very heightened and very theatrical, and that’s fun to play,” Dinklage told the New Yorker in a 2019 interview. “We wanted to really strip it all down and get to the core of what it really is about, which is everybody’s capacity to not feel worthy of love, whether you have a giant nose or not. Anybody can step into the shoes I’m wearing now, in terms of the part. They don’t have to be my height. We all have that insecurity—the desire for something that we don’t know if we’re worthy of, whether it be a woman, a man, or anybody’s affection.”
Schmidt’s theatrical version of Cyrano has been adapted into a feature film, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 2021. Schmidt’s other writing and directing credits include Humor Abuse (for which she won the 2009 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show), People Be Heard, Debbie Does Dallas, Taking Care of Baby, and A Month in the Country.
Dinklage And Schmidt Prefer To Keep Their Lives Private
When we say this couple likes to keep their private life out of the public eye, we’re not kidding. Neither Dinklage nor Schmidt appears to be on social media, and they haven’t even publicly disclosed the names of their two children. In fact, Dinklage made sure to correct an interviewer in 2015 about an erroneous report on Wikipedia regarding his daughter’s name. “Let me tell you right now: her name is not Zelig,” he told the Guardian. “But it’s hilarious that that’s a fact in Wikipedia.” When asked if he wanted a correction to be made, the actor simply responded, “I don’t care.”
Dinklage says that he’s just not interested in living a glamorous Hollywood lifestyle. “People see actors at red-carpet events and think that applies to my whole life, but it really doesn’t,” the Avengers: Infinity War star told the Guardian. “I live in New York and I have a little place in the woods where I tend my garden. I like privacy and all this [press] is not my thing. I’m not jetting off to another fancy place after this.”
On top of wanting to maintain his anonymity and protect his family’s privacy, Dinklage says he ultimately thinks actors are more convincing when they don’t let the public know too much about their real-life personas. “I worry about actors revealing what’s behind the curtain,” he said in a 2018 interview with Vulture. “Yes, I’m talking to you here, but we’re talking about a project. I wouldn’t even imagine beginning to talk about my personal life. It’s no one’s business. That’s my life.”