GOT’s Peter Dinklage and wife Erica’s relationship timeline

Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage has had a long career – and an equally long and successful marriage to his wife Erica Schmidt.

The pair met nearly twenty years ago at a mutual friend’s house in New York City.

“It’s been about eighteen years now. We were all at a friend’s house and someone said, ‘They’re walking the elephants through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel,'” Dinklage recalled in a 2021 interview with The New York Times. “The circus was in town and it was snowing, and they had the elephants walking through Manhattan, a long line. It looked like something out of a beautiful, fantastic, crazy, romantic movie at the end of the world. …So that’s the night we met, the night the elephants walked through Manhattan.”

The couple tied the knot in 2005 and welcomed a daughter in 2011 and a second child in 2017.

The power couple has been going strong ever since and has even worked on multiple projects together, including the musical Cyrano which was later adapted into a movie in 2022. While Schmidt wrote the musical, Dinklage took on the titular role – which he later admitted he begged his wife to do.

“Begged? Yes. I mean, basically, yeah, that’s true,” he said in a 2021 interview CBS News. “For an actor, you always want to do something that scares you – at least for me… I just haven’t sung since I was a kid.”

Keep scrolling to learn more about Dinklage and Schmidt’s relationship:

Their first meeting

Dinklage and Schmidt first met at a mutual friend’s house in New York City in the early 2000s, which Dinklage described as something out of a “crazy, romantic movie.”

Their elopement

Instead of a traditional wedding, the duo decided to go to Vegas and tie the knot in 2005.

“I went there for a charity event and while we were there we decided to just do it,” Dinklage said in a 2016 interview with The New York Times. “It was a bit lonely. We have a VHS videocassette of the wedding that no one will ever see, which we buried in a box deep beneath the Earth’s core.

Welcoming their children

Schmidt welcomed her and Dinklage’s first child together, a girl, in 2011, but they have yet to reveal her name or exact date of birth.

During the 2012 Golden Globes, Dinklage shared with Access to Hollywood that fatherhood was “incredible” and “life-changing.”

In 2017, We weekly confirmed that the couple had welcomed their second child together.

Dinklage about Schmidt’s talents

In 2015, Dinklage talked about how “brilliant” his wife is. “She loves theater. Unlike many other people in our profession where film is the ultimate goal, theater is sacred to her. It’s not entertainment; it is art,” he said The guard at the time. “She is very inspiring. She’s definitely the artist of the family…I’m just the TV actor who pays the bills.