CANCUN — Peter Dinklage can do no wrong in our books: It’s simply because he’s the only actor with both the legitimate skills and the charisma to steal the show, whether he is playing Tyrion Lannister in HBO’s Game Of Thrones or Eddie “The Fire Blaster” Plant in Pixels.

Can you see the shrewd, dry-witted and resourceful Tyrion as a video arcade gaming champion with a mullet? Absolutely, but only because Dinklage is the one playing it.

But taking on such varied roles is what one has come to expect from the 46-year-old who was born with achondroplasia, the most common form of short-limbed dwarfism. He refused to play to stereotype: Even as a starving actor, the Emmy and Golden Globe Award winner didn’t take on roles as elves, leprechauns or anything that made him feel “dirty”. “I said no (to) a lot (of roles),” he said in a previous interview.

Despite Dinklage’s memorable debut in 1995’s Living In Oblivion and breakout performance in The Station Agent (2003), it was undoubtedly Game Of Thrones that propelled him to international stardom.

He has reiterated that he owes the Game Of Thrones author George R R Martin much gratitude, especially for “making a dwarf a fully fleshed-out human being”. But acting in a film such as Pixels also makes for a nice change of pace.

“That show has been my job now for about five or six years, and it’s a pretty serious show. That is why I love jumping into something like Pixels,” he said. “It’s such a joy to mix it up. I don’t want to bore anyone, least of all myself, in terms of repeating roles. The last thing you want to do is to do something Game Of Thrones-like and you get a lot of those offers. It’s like, ‘I do a really good version of that genre’, so I don’t need to do Beastmaster on my time off.”

So how does he deal when he’s offered many projects that are similar to Game of Thrones? “It’s easy. You just say, ‘No, thank you.’ It’s really easy to say that now, though not early on in your career when you are struggling,” he revealed. “But it’s good to say, ‘no,’ because you do have control.”

He added: “A lot of actors feel like they are not getting to do the things they want to do and they don’t have any choices. Maybe I am talking from a stupid, privileged perspective, because I do have a nice TV job that I can rely on financially, but it’s very important to be able to say, ‘No’.”

But when it came to Pixels, saying yes was “a no-brainer”, said the actor who will next star with Melissa McCarthy in Michelle Darnell.

“It is a bit of a party!” he said of his time on set. “Comedy is a real science. You are always trying to find the funniest thread and while this movie was definitely scripted by Adam (Sandler) and the other writers, they were always very open to other ideas and improvising.”

“Josh Gad is just incredible at that,” he added. “Adam, (director) Chris Columbus and the writers could always pick the jokes they wrote in the editing room if they want to but they loved the options that we brought to the table. That is why they cast us. They saw something in us that we could bring to the characters and they want to be challenged just like we do, so it never had anything to do with ego.

“Sometimes, actors think they can improve scripts but I think that often has to do with the actor’s ego rather than making the quality of the script better. But Pixels was a true collaboration.”

Pixels is still showing in cinemas.