Plenty of celebs have stories about interesting or memorable fan encounters, but few are as haunting as the one Peter Dinklage tells in the March issue of Esquire. Sometime after his star-making turn in 2003's The Station Agent, Dinklage witnessed a man die on the street in front of him — an experience he describes as "meaningful."
"One morning, I was walking down Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. There was this guy on a motorcycle right in front of me — about as far away as that plant, maybe six feet? And he looked at me," the Game of Thrones star, 44, recalled in his interview for Esquire's style issue. "He didn't wave, but he looked at me, and then he pulled out into traffic and this car, like, boom — killed him instantly."
"I was the last person he saw on earth," Dinklage said. "And I connected with him."
After the accident, Dinklage got someone in a coffee shop to call an ambulance and then went back outside to be with the man. The driver had stopped but was slow getting out of his car, so there was a brief period of time when the actor was alone with the victim.
"There was this quiet moment where it was like I was the only person in the world who knew this guy was dead," Dinklage, a married father of one, explained. "And I was there looking at him, you know, in those moments of calm after something horrible happens, the calm before the melee starts, before the ambulances and the cops arrive and it becomes a scene. There was that moment when I was with him."
"He was probably about 25. He'd probably just had breakfast at the same place I was headed," the Emmy winner said. "And then he died. It's like, he was robbed."
