Peter Dinklage disputes My Dinner with Hervé "whitewashing" controversy: "Hervé wasn’t Filipino"

Entertainment Weekly

"He was French, and of German and English descent," says the Game of Thrones star, who received some backlash last year over his casting to play the Fantasy Island star in the HBO movie My Dinner with Hervé from those saying that he shouldn't play a person who is half-Asian. Dinklage says Wikipedia falsely stated that Villechaize was half-Filipino and half-white. "There’s this term 'whitewashing,'"  Dinklage tells Entertainment Weekly. "I completely understand that. But Hervé wasn’t Filipino. Dwarfism manifests physically in many different ways. I have a very different type of dwarfism than Hervé had. I’ve met his brother and other members of his family. He was French, and of German and English descent. So it’s strange these people are saying he’s Filipino. They kind of don’t have any information. I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes or sense of justice because I feel the exact same way when there’s some weird racial profile. But these people think they’re doing the right thing politically and morally and it’s actually getting flipped because what they’re doing is judging and assuming what he is ethnically based on his looks alone. He has a very unique face and people have to be very careful about this stuff. This (movie) isn’t Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Personally, I would never do that, and I haven’t done that, because he wasn’t. People are jumping to conclusions based on a man’s appearance alone and that saddens me."