Watching his performance as Bolivar Trask in The X-Men: Days Of Future Past last night, I found myself thinking that Peter Dinklage might make for an interesting Careerview. He’s not the most prolific actor in the world and his filmography is not without egregiously terrible efforts, like Tiptoes, or A Little Bit Of Heaven, where he played a stripper. But Dinklage tends to make smart, interesting choices and then makes the most of them. It can’t be easy being an actor in an entertainment world that has a long tendency to cast little people in a handful of demeaning roles as elves, leprechauns, and whatnot, but Dinklage has conducted his career with character and integrity.

So I don’t know exactly what to make of the news that Dinklage’s long-in-the-works leprechaun comedy O’Lucky Day, in which he plays a man who tries to convince people he’s a leprechaun, may have finally found a director in Adam Shankman, who’s reached the “in talks” stage of negotiations. Shankman is a former choreographer (who worked with the likes of MC Skat Kat, and, to a lesser extent, Paula Abdul) with the occasional crowd-pleaser to his name—like his fun, if less-than-transcendent adaptation of the Hairspray musical—and a whole bunch of insulting flops, like Bringing Down The House, Rock Of Ages, and The Pacifier.

The film has been described as being in the cranky, profanely cantankerous Bad Santa mold, a film that was frequently referenced in comparison to O’Lucky Day screenwriter Andrew Dodge’s previous film, Bad Words, starring Jason Bateman as a profane adult who tries to win children’s spelling bees. Incidentally, a while ago I had the pleasure of hanging out with Bad Santa director Terry Zwigoff when I was leading Q&As after screenings of Bad Santa, and he mentioned that Dinklage was considered for the role of Billy Bob Thornton’s belligerent sidekick, but that Zwigoff saw him more as a dramatic than a comic actor.

In an earlier piece about O’Lucky Day, The Hollywood Reporter described it as “deep in R-rated territory but wrapped around an emotional heart.” Given Shankman’s track record with family-friendly, vaguely offensive schlock, it’ll be interesting to see whether the film makes it onscreen with its raunch intact, or whether Shankman will lead it into cuddlier, more mainstream directions. It’s great to see a great actor like Dinklage headline a potentially big mainstream studio comedy, but I’d be a lot more excited if it were in the hands of someone other than Shankman, whose idea of edgy generally translates to “kind of racist”—at least where Bringing Down The House was concerned.