Peter Dinklage and Shirley MacLaine Star In Dark Comedy About the "American Dream"

"American Dreamer" stars one of the most unusual pairs to ever grace the screen

There's a funny aspect to growing housing costs that are driving out the middle class. It's only that Peter Dinklage's character, Phil Loder, a college professor, finds it extremely difficult to see the humor in such extreme unaffordability.

Dinklage, a resident of New York City, claims to be confused by the housing market.

"I walked around Manhattan at night and there were all these enormous penthouse apartment buildings that are just empty," he said in an interview over Zoom. "Nobody lives in them. Cuz they're dark at night so we're sorta losing neighborhood. Nobody can afford anything anymore."

"American Dreamer," which was influenced by a "This American Life" episode, stars Dinklage alongside the renowned Shirley MacLaine as a woman who is prepared to sell her estate for pennies on the dollar in exchange for being allowed to remain there till the end of her life. Vancouver and Vancouver Island served as the filming locations.

For a magazine feature, MacLaine spent two days in New York City in 1970 with C.D.B. Bryan, the father of Evening presenter Saint Bryan. They watched trailers for her film Desperate Characters together. Saint Bryan showed MacLaine and Dinklage what his father had written.

"There was something very strange about sitting next to Shirley MacLaine and watching Shirley MacLaine watching Shirley MacLaine on the movie screen in front of me...and I had an insane impulse to ask Shirley MacLaine to hold hands!"

MacLaine laughed and joked "Well I won't tell you the rest of the story, son..."

MacLaine also lived outside Tacoma, in Graham, between 1985 and 1993 where she wrote many of her best-selling books.

 

Dinklage frequently appears in "American Dreamer" with bandages covering his face due to injuries he sustained on his own. Though he did injure himself, he has too much respect for stuntmen to label them as such.

"If I have a crick neck at the end of the day it means I've earned my keep," Dinklage said. "If I have a couple of bruises, so be it. We shouldn't be pampered as actors. We should put stones in our shoes and be uncomfortable now and again."

Despite being one of the strangest pairs to ever grace the big screen, American Dreamer finds its joys in the comic interplay between the two leads.

"I think we liked each other immediately," MacLaine said. "As soon as I met him on the street, big hug, and somehow we connected and it was real. I really like him."

The feelings are mutual.

"Fingers crossed when you are just in love with someone through their movie performances that they're going to be just as great in life," Dinklage said. "And of course I was correct in assuming Shirley was, and then some, the most charismatic, loveliest person."