Is Cyrano a catfisher or literary superhero? ‘It’s not a blame game’, says Peter Dinklage

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Once Dinklage started reading for Schmidt the adaptation quickly took shape. Theater 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 united 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 emphasizes 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 stylized 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 recognize.

“That’s what you want from your director,” Dinklage says. “He was inspired by Erica’s original theater 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 valor 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 favorite 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?

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“No! Matt has one of my favorite 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-honored elements, including Ben Mendelsohn as the entitled Duke De Guiche, who is pressing 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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