Dan Kois, who I had the pleasure of hanging out with at SXSW, has a flat-out fantastic profile of Peter Dinklage in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, just in time for the return of Game of Thrones (I’ll hopefully have a comprehensive review tomorrow as long as my screeners are there when I get home) on Sunday. What makes it so good is not just that Dinklage is a wonderful actor and an interesting person, but that it’s a great explication of what happens when an actor refuses to take roles that compromise his dignity, a conundrum that’s applicable not only to people of short stature. Kois writes:

Dinklage’s sudden stardom offers a pleasurable meritocratic twist to his career, given that the entertainment industry doesn’t typically reward those who turn down roles on principle, much less actors who don’t meet a certain physical ideal. Sure, James Gandolfini struggled before “The Sopranos” made him an unlikely leading man. But James Gandolfini didn’t eat potato chips for dinner every night because he conscientiously objected to playing one of Santa’s elves in Kmart ads…Dinklage stayed in New York and soon was landing stage work and the occasional low-budget film. But he couldn’t book commercial jobs, because he wasn’t interested in the kinds of roles that paid well for dwarves. Specifically, he wouldn’t play elves or leprechauns. Even after Dinklage’s memorable first film role in the 1995 Steve Buscemi indie comedy “Living in Oblivion” — Dinklage played an actor who’s annoyed to be cast in a dream sequence, demanding, “Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it?” — he still couldn’t get an agent. “Word got out,” he says. “I started to build up a resentment. And that fueled my desire to live in a cold apartment and be like: ‘I don’t need you! I’m gonna write poetry. Why would I want to be a member of your club if you don’t want me?’”

Standing up to that kind of commercial and financial pressure must be tremendously difficult, and knowing that he did it makes me admire Dinklage even more than I already do. Mark Povinelli, the actor with dwarfism who played Chelsea (Laura Prepon)’s coworker Todd on the otherwise-awful Are You There, Chelsea? joked in a recent episode that Dinklage hogs all the roles for devastatingly handsome men of short stature. But the fact that Todd’s character exists at all, and exists as something other than a joke, is probably attributable in part to Dinklage’s success. It’s hard to think of an actor who’s as clearly opened a previously-closed door in recent years.

On a less serious note, Colin McEnroe was kind enough to have me, Lev Grossman, and a couple other folks on his show this afternoon to talk about the resonance of A Song of Ice and Fire. Audio, including my dorky confessions about writing Star Wars fan fiction, is up now. I imagine y’all are as excited as I am.

It was a dull show, though I appreciated Meryl Streep calling out the long list of wonderful roles for women in 2011 (and I bet Pariah, which is on my list to see soon, will get a nice bump from this). But for my money, Peter Dinklage had the most powerful moment of the evening when he suggested people Google the name Martin Henderson. It turns out he meant not the actor, but a British man with dwarfism who may be spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair after he was picked up and tossed. The attack on him came in the wake of a visit by members of England’s Rugby team to a dwarf-tossing competition in New Zealand (in a deeply uncharming proposal, a Florida Republican lawmaker proposed last fall that dwarf-tossing should be legalized as a job creation measure—the practice was banned after someone who was being tossed ended up dead as a result), and Henderson suggests that the team’s visit may have legitimized the practice. I’ve had some folks tell me that dwarf-tossing is an established cultural practice in New Zealand, but there’s no question that it would have been possible to decline without being disrespectful. And given that a lot of people don’t have contact with either people of short stature or people with disabilities in general, I actually think it’s reasonably plausible that if your’e dumb enough, seeing sports heroes be amused by abusing people with dwarfism could legitimate a practice that you could only participate in if you saw the people involved as less than human, an object of your own entertainment.

Dinklage didn’t have to deliver a sermon: he intrigued people into researching a terrible story on their own, one that ought to remind them that while he’s lucky enough to be winning Emmys, aspiring actors like Martin Henderson are at risk of terrible violence and discrimination because of their stature. And that’s a critically important thing to remind the rest of us about. I think people are aware that it’s physically difficult and frustrating to be physically disabled. But I don’t know that most people know the other ways discrimination against disabled people plays out. Just 20.7 percent of people with disabilities participate in the labor force, compared with 69.3 percent of able-bodied people. Disability magnifies the impact and risk of domestic and sexual violence. And students with disabilities drop out of school at twice the rate of their able-bodied peers. These are critically important issues, and ones that I think often go invisible.

For that reason, I’m excited for Sundance Channel’s Push Girls, a reality show about four women in Los Angeles who also happen to be paralyzed. I haven’t seen my screeners for the show yet, but the stars—Angela, Auti, Mia and Tiphany—were the standouts of Saturday’s presentations at the Television Critics Association press tour. In part, it was because they were a striking contrast to the images of disabled people we normally see in popular culture: gorgeous, super-groomed (they all had fantastic shoes), even dancing on stage in their chairs. But the show, in the clips they showed us, also made clear how terrifying it must be to do something you used to love after you lose some of the physical abilities that let you do it. I think seeing Mia get back into the pool and start swimming laps for the first time since she was paralyzed was one of the most emotional moment many of my fellow critics had on tour.

These women, and Peter Dinklage, are important. In their own ways, they’re forcefully asserting that people with dwarfism and with physical disabilities can be competent, can be sexy, can be an awful lot of fun, can be advocates. If moronic behavior in the public eye did, in fact, contribute to the acts that paralyzed Martin Henderson, strong, powerful countervailing images are more necessary than ever.