Peter Dinklage

In The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023), Peter Dinklage's Dean Casca Highbottom drinks and glowers. His one scene of real bitterness is more interesting than the glowering: at last there is something to understand about the man. We were frustrated, because that glimpse made the film's lack of interest in him harder to forgive. Francis Lawrence gives him too little to work with.

The path from Living in Oblivion (1995) to the lead in The Station Agent (2003) established the independent-film actor before the fantasy star. As Finbar McBride in the latter, he gave an outsider enough humanity to resist becoming a type. Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones (2011–2019) made that intelligence and comic timing widely familiar. He had been reluctant to take fantasy roles; the part brought widespread recognition. We do not need his characters to become agreeable before we take an interest in them.

The voice work can be less rewarding. In Steven Caple Jr.'s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023), his Scourge collects badges from the machines he has killed and likes to announce it. The baritone gives this villain sufficient menace for a 12A, though the nastiness stays safely vague. Dinklage does the job the film requires, but there is little in the part to suggest it needed him in particular.

Wicked (2024) makes better use of that authority by giving it to Dr Dillamond, a goat professor whose fellow animals are losing their speech. Jon M. Chu gives him a character whose ability to speak matters, rather than another opportunity to sound dangerous. Yet the surrounding film keeps delaying its progress: editors Myron Kerstein and James Finlan handle the songs carefully, while the stretches between them drag. Dillamond is one of several supporting characters competing for time in a film that already takes too much of it.

The lead in the musical Cyrano (2021) is a useful reminder that he need not always be fitted around somebody else's story. We would like more of that room, whatever the genre. He is worth casting for more than the voice, and worth giving something to do besides looking displeased with everyone else. For a first encounter, we would choose The Station Agent over the franchise work.