I’ve known dwarves with very average jobs (Ones a mechanic)who get movie parts because of their height in between their day jobs and they were glad of it .
(Though moaned about the money )
True story: There used to be a bar in the Patpong red-light area called Cleopatra. It was actually in the next lane over, Patpong 2, but part of the same area. Like many bars, it put on “special shows.” For a while they featured a normal-sized lady and a male dwarf. She was hot! She’d dance around some to begin with. But then out came the dwarf. Turns out the lady was a babysitter. And the dwarf was the baby – diaper, bonnet, pacifier, the whole outfit. Baby was a bad boy, a very bad boy. He needed a spanking. Then one thing led to another, and you can imagine how it finally ended.
Demeaning? Well, maybe. But I could imagine him sitting around with his friends, knocking back a few brews, then pointing at the lady as she walks by and saying: “I get to tap that every night.”
You can see the bigotry in considering an entire minority to be a “character”, right? This would be like considering “Black” or “woman” to be a character trait (which Hollywood does somewhat do, actually) - I mean, you do get ugly little people. You get obese ones, redneck ones, gangster-looking ones - also lesbian ones (hell, Oscar-winning lesbian ones), Black ones, funny ones - even good-looking leading man/woman types (like Dinklage or Meredith Eaton(rowr)). To reduce all of that to “dwarf” as a character trait is bigotry, IMO.
By the time A Song of Ice and Fire gets to the point that GoT is at (after Blackwater, so CoK), Tyrion’s face is mangled to hell, and before that he is described as pretty ugly. Obviously that aspect was changed when they hired Peter Dinklage. But I want to say he was not hired through a casting call but personally, because he’s the shit (<hipster>I heard about him before you did!</hipster>).
As an aside, a side benefit of his acting career was being hugged by Princess Leia. When he was 11.
http://cloud.lomography.com/570/724/71/ebfd0a4c5d54eec8ee5692e2dd16224fe57fd4.jpg
He played an Ewok in the Empire Strikes Back, which I hadn’t realised.
Really? Wicket (who is pretty much the Ewok - one of the most important Ewoks in Empire, and the main character in all the Ewok spinoffs) is the primary role I know Davis for.
I presume you mean Return of the Jedi?