PLEASANTVILLE.(actor Peter Dinklage)(Interview)

Usually, Peter Dinklage plays ghoulish or zany character roles, in dream sequences or crime capers; he's four feet five inches tall--a dwarf. But in "The Station Agent," which opens next week, he gets to be the leading man, a downhearted train buff named Fin who inherits an abandoned railway depot in a New Jersey town and, through various contrivances, comes to find fellowship, if not love, exactly, among a couple of lonesome regular-height strangers. Last winter at the Sundance Film Festival, "The Station Agent," which was made for less than a million dollars, won the audience and screenwriting awards and was bought by Miramax. Now there is talk of Dinklage becoming a star, though it is unclear if this is because he is a curiosity or because he is good.

Part of being a leading man in such a picture is being driven and flown all over the place, to festivals and screenings and parties, in the pursuit of what is known as word-of-mouth, and so one night last week Dinklage found himself in the back seat of a Town Car, hurtling up the F.D.R. Drive, en route to Pleasantville, in Westchester County. He was scheduled to do a Q.&A. session immediately following a screening of the film at the Jacob Burns Film Center, a renovated old theatre that has become a tristate-area staging ground for independent films.

Dinklage was wearing his seat belt; his feet dangled above the floor. He is thirty-four and has tousled brown hair and is known to his friends as Dink, or the Dink, which he doesn't seem to mind. "Yesterday, I was in Atlanta," he said. "They had me in a hotel room doing interviews. Tomorrow, I fly to Paris, and the next day to Spain, for the San Sebastian film festival. Then Aspen, and then Rio de Janeiro, some film-festival thing. There are actors who do this for movies they hate. Must be rough."

First, though, there had to be Mamaroneck, which does not have a film festival and is not really on the way to Pleasantville. "Is O.K. if you are fifteen-twenty minutes late?" the driver, Renado, asked. ...