I think our drummer, Jim. It was a lot of fun. Then we all went our separate ways. But I felt like I was being just a dilettante. They were all real musicians, and they still are. I was just slumming it, having fun, and I don’t think that’s fair. I guess for a front man, it’s a common thing—they have more fun than anybody else.

You didn’t escape unscathed. Don’t you have a scar from crowd-surfing at CBGB’s or something?

I think my friend kicked me in the head. It was O.K. The show went on. I was bleeding all over the place, but it’s rock and roll. You see pictures of those guys back in the day—Sid Vicious or whatever. It’s punk rock, man.

The fact that you have a scar from playing at CBGB’s does make you cooler than most people.

It’s right here. [He reveals a scar over his right eye.]

What were some of your songs called?

I think The New Yorker is too clean for the song titles.

No, it’s not.

Well, one was called “Dick of the Party,” about being a loser drunk at a party. So. I’ll leave it there.

You’re doing this Off Broadway musical directly after starring in the biggest show on television. Were you looking to do something less world-conquering?

I don’t really have an agenda. Whatever is inspiring to me, I go for it. Obviously, you don’t want to repeat yourself. I’m not going to jump into another show with dragons. When I first moved here, all we did was plays. That’s all you think you’re going to do when you’re young in the nineties in New York. You never think about movies or television, because TV: selling out. Movies: who does those? Movie stars. Nothing to do with me. So we just do plays. The older you get, it’s a little tricky, because it’s night life. It rules your day, because it’s the end of every day. And then the adrenaline kicks in at eight o’clock till midnight. I’m a morning person. It doesn’t bode well for theatre actors.

So, I am going to have rocks thrown at me if I don’t ask you about the finale of “Game of Thrones.”

Who throws these rocks? The New Yorker is such a peaceful magazine. The cartoonists? Do they throw pictures of rocks?

Peter, any thoughts on how “Game of Thrones” ended?

[He stares blankly.]

Let me ask you this: Did you follow the fan response?

No. Well, everybody’s always going to have an opinion, and that means an ownership. It’s like breaking up with somebody. They get upset. I can’t speak for everybody, but my feeling is they didn’t want it to end, so a lot of people got angry. I feel like what [the showrunners] Dave [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] did was extraordinary. This happens. Monsters are created. And you don’t see it coming. We vote them into office. You look the other way. So for everybody to get upset because they loved a character so much and they had so much faith in that person—there were signposts all along the way for that character.

You’re speaking, of course, about—spoiler alert—Daenerys Targaryen, who took a bit of a fascist turn.

Yeah. But that’s because of what was happening all along. It added up to something. There are people who’ve named their children Khaleesi. You’ve just got to maybe wait till the series finale before you get that tattoo or name your golden retriever Daenerys! I can’t help you! I’m sorry. She went mad. She was driven to that, and she’s a victim as well in terms of how she was treated. She went through it, and she came out angry, as a lot of us do.

Did you expect that Tyrion would survive through to the end?

No. None of us did. We were all nervous when we got the scripts.

This show took up a good ten years of your life. Looking back, did Tyrion evolve in a way that was connected to how you evolved as a person?

Not particularly. I just loved Northern Ireland, where we shot it. It became my second home. So I miss that life. I miss all of that. It’s pretty extreme things he went through. He killed his father and his girlfriend. I didn’t really progress along the same path as he did. But I did enjoy playing him.

You now have your own production company, and one of the things that you’ve done is the HBO film called “My Dinner with Hervé,” which came out last year. You play Hervé Villechaize, the French-born actor who played Nick Nack in the James Bond film “The Man with the Golden Gun” and is most famous for saying “De plane! De plane!” on the seventies show “Fantasy Island.” This project was fourteen years in the making, right?

Yeah. Sacha Gervasi, the writer-director, was a journalist who was flown to Hollywood to interview Hervé Villechaize, almost as a joke. And it changed his life. He was just as guilty as anybody with any sort of prejudice about this dwarf on an Aaron Spelling show. He was a serious journalist, but he was resentful of being sent on a puff-piece mission—until he met the man, who he realized was incredibly complicated. Hervé killed himself a couple days after Sacha said goodbye to him, so Sacha realized it was sort of a suicide note. Which is in true Hervé style. The man did nothing quietly. For a small man, he cast a huge shadow after his death. It was the first time I’ve ever played somebody who actually existed.

Not only did he exist but he was probably the most famous actor with dwarfism before you.

He wasn’t really an actor, to be fair. [Looks heavenward.] Sorry, Hervé, I love you. He was an incredible painter. He just enjoyed the life style of it all. We’re opposite in that way. I try to keep a lower profile, but I enjoy the work itself. Hervé liked to burn bright. He loved being the rock star that he was, and that got the better of him, because when you put fame in front of the work, what’s the work? That exists so much now in our culture, with the Internet and everybody just wanting to be famous. So he was guilty of that, because he was having a really good time and unapologetic about it. He railed against the idea that he couldn’t do certain things. Because he could, and he did. Like Cyrano, he was a romantic. He wooed and he won many women, which, because of his size, was treated in the press, like, “Wow!” That wouldn’t happen with anybody else who was regular size. It was a novelty that he was with women. Well, yeah. He was. Deal with it.

He was on TV when you were growing up in the seventies. What were your feelings about him, and about representation in popular culture of dwarfism in general?

When you’re eight years old, social justice is not really entering into your biosphere. I remember being aware that on “Fantasy Island” he was the sidekick. But nothing that really bothered me. As a kid, you don’t really care how you’re perceived. You sort of go head first into everything and let your parents pick up the mess. But then adolescence changes all that. If you live in a unique shape, you become hyperaware of the world around you and how it reacts to you and how you engage with it.