Peter Dinklagemay be eyeing the end of hisGame of Thronesrun, but the actor isn’t done with the fantasy genre quite yet.Varietyreports that Dinklage is attached to star in and co-produce Sony’sRumpelstiltskin,based on the classic Brothers Grimm story.
Patrick Ness—who wrote both the book and the screenplay forA Monster Callsand created the short-livedDoctor Whospin-off,Class—is set to pen the script. Reports are pretty light on story details other than the fact Dinklage would play the title character of the Grimm fairy tale, which, in classic Grimm fashion, is far more disturbing than any children’s story has the right to be. The German yarn revolves around a girl locked in a tower by a king who gives the order to spin straw into gold or lose her head by the morning. Enter rambunctious little a-hole Rumpelstiltskin, who offers to spin the straw into gold in exchange for the girl’s necklace. Things escalate into more extreme trades from there, until the girl promises her first born child. Just your classic, horrifying imp creature fairy tale.
The film is still deep in the development stage and would most likely not be Dinklage’s first project following the eighth and final season ofGame of Thrones,which premieres in the “first half” of 2019.
But really, the story is that the cast of HBO’s fantasy mega-hit is lining up their post-Westeros slates in the first place. Such is the effect of a pop culture juggernaut likeGame of Thrones, where audiences grow so accustomed to seeing an actor in a role over several years they almost can’t imagine them stepping into another character’s shoes. Dinklage seems to be doing particularly fine, though; his last big-screen appearance was in the bajillion-dollar Marvel clusterfuckAvengers: Infinity War,and that was coming off a notable role in the Oscar-nominatedThree Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The actor’s upcoming apocalypse buddy movieI Think We’re Alone Nowtook home the“U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Excellence in Filmmaking”at this year’s Sundance.
