It took hours of makeup to transform Peter Dinklage, left, into Trumpkin for the Prince Caspian movie. With him in this scene is Warwick Davis.

Phil Bray

You might not recognize his name, but you’d probably quickly recognize Peter Dinklage from his many roles in Elf, Nip/Tuck, Penelope, Death at a Funeral and his breakout role in the lauded cult film The Station Agent.

Dinklage is a Little Person with a big screen presence, something that shines through his long blond wig and heavy makeup in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which opens today.

He’s also very familiar with Providence, having spent a month here during the summer of 2006 playing mad scientist Dr. Barsinister in Disney’s Underdog. “I was back in Providence last weekend,” he said over the phone from New York City. Dinklage’s wife, Erica Schmidt, teaches directing and was “teaching at Brown for one semester once a week,” he explained, adding that “it was nice to be back and getting to visit McCormick & Schmick’s again.”

He remembers that filming his scenes for Underdog in Providence took “three or four weeks,” so he managed to soak up some of the local history and “when I did have some free time went up the Hill where I had a lot of great Italian food.” But often, he added, he’d be working “12 hours a day and on my day off a lot of times I’d just want to stay in my room in the Biltmore and sleep.”

Although he had to wear more special makeup in Underdog than in anything he’d previously done, it was nothing compared with the three hours it took every day to turn him into Prince Caspian’s Trumpkin the Red Dwarf. “We’d get to the set when it was still dark outside and when we left in the evening it was just getting dark.” Besides the three hours it took to apply the wig and makeup, it took another hour to take it off. And this went on for “about 100 days. I worked on the picture for about nine months, which is about as long as movies get.”

Most of that time was spent in a studio in Prague in the Czech Republic, with a few weeks of shooting exteriors in New Zealand and also in Poland and Slovenia. “It was filmed mostly in Eastern Europe,” he said.

He’d read the first book in author C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series “as a kid and I saw the first movie [The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe] when it came out and I thought it was really, really magic.

“So when [director] Andrew Adamson contacted me about doing this film I read Prince Caspian and I didn’t know how they’d make a movie of it. It seemed tricky to adapt. When Andrew and I talked, the script wasn’t even finished. But he showed me some of the ideas in storyboard animation” and Dinklage was sold.

When he can spare the time, Dinklage performs in stage plays as well, having appeared in the title role in The Public Theatre’s production of Richard III, plus performances at the Gate Theatre in Dublin and the Barbican Theatre in London. This summer he’ll star in Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Bard College Summerscape festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., then head “to LA for a couple of independent movies before I begin the next Narnia movie in October.” It’s called The Chonicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

“There are seven books in the series,” he added, “and now they want to do them back to back as the kids get older. I’m not sure how many of the books Trumpkin is in, though.” But he’s game, 300 hours in the makeup chair over 100 days notwithstanding. As Dinklage says, “A working actor is a lucky actor.”

mjanuson@projo.com