Why Peter Dinklage was cast in love triangle rom-com with Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei: 'He's hot, and he's brilliant'

Rebecca Miller didn’t play coy when asked how she landed on Peter Dinklage to star in her new romantic comedy, She Came to Me, playing an opera composer who cheats on his therapist wife (Anne Hathaway) with a tugboat operator (Marisa Tomei).

“He’s hot, and he’s brilliant,” the writer-director gushed to Yahoo Entertainment in an interview alongside co-stars Hathaway and Tomei. (She Came to Me was granted a waiver by SAG-AFTRA, allowing its actors to participate in interviews despite the ongoing strike). “He’s funny, and he transmits anxiety like nobody else. … He’s playing a part that’s unusual for him. He often plays very confident characters, and this is a character who really doesn’t have that kind of confidence. But at the same time, his masculinity is so appealing, and I just think he's original. ... He's just the real deal.” (Miller knows a thing or two about real-deal actors: she’s married to arguably the greatest actor alive, Daniel Day-Lewis, who retired in 2017.)

The Emmy-winning Game of Thrones actor plays Steven Lauddem, whose intense writer’s block is derailing his latest opus. Walking his dog one late-morning (the film was shot and in Dinklage’s actual Brooklyn neighborhood), he pops into a bar and meets Katrina, a Louisiana tugboat operator on her day off. He tags along for a tour of her vessel, learns she’s “addicted to romance,” briefly imagines she’s an axe-wielding serial killer, and does the deed with her, anyway… and boom, inspiration has struck for his next opera.

“It was a lot of fun, I feel like we kind of work in a similar way,” says Tomei, noting she previously made another film with Dinklage prior to She Came to Me, but she doubts it will ever be released. “I felt that way when I got on the set and it was just really easy. … It felt very at home.”

“It was such a joy,” says Hathaway. “I saw Peter in a production of Richard III at the Public Theater [in New York] at some point during the 2000s, and it was before Game of Thrones and all of that. And [his 1995 film] Living in Oblivion is one of my favorite films, like absolute forever top 10 list. So the idea of working with Peter was pretty huge to me. I was just really excited to find out that he's just the most glorious actor, that he does listen, and that he's a really fun person to spend time with. I did feel like I made a friend who I could also make art with, which is so ideal.”

Hathaway and Tomei also had plenty of praise for one another.

“Acting with Marisa Tomei was very, very, very high, if not on top of my bucket list,” Hathaway said of teaming up with the My Cousin Vinny Oscar winner.

“As Annie said,” Tomei returned, “for us to just play together and was really just a dream.”

She Came to Me is now in theaters.