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

The twosome met nearly two decades ago at a mutual friend’s house in New York City.

“It was about 18 years ago 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 were walking the elephants through Manhattan, a long line of them. It was like something out of a beautiful, fantastical, end-of-the-world, crazy, romantic movie. … 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 have been going strong since then — and have even worked on multiple projects together, including the musical Cyrano which was later adapted into a film in 2022. While Schmidt wrote the musical, Dinklage took on the titular role — which he later admitted to begging his wife for.

“Begged? Yeah. I mean, essentially, yes, that’s true,” he shared in a 2021 interview with CBS News. “For an actor, you always wanna do something that — for me at least — that scares you … I just never had 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 friends’ house in New York City in the early 2000s, which Dinklage described to be 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 was going there for a charity event and then while we were there, we just decided to do it,” Dinklage shared in a 2016 interview with The New York Times. “It was a bit lonely. We got a VHS videocassette of the wedding that no one will ever see, that we’ve buried in a box deep beneath the earth’s core.”

Welcoming Their Children

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

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

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In 2017, Us Weekly confirmed that the pair had welcomed their second child together.

Dinklage On Schmidt’s Talents

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

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