On his way to meet me at his favorite Brooklyn dive, Peter Dinklage saw a dwarf on the subway. The man recognized Dinklage and told him that he was an actor, too, and that rather than take a paycheck to play yet another elf at yet another Radio City Christmas Spectacular, he quit. "I just want to thank you for what you've done," he said to Dinklage.

And yet now, a few minutes later, Dinklage is unsure what to make of the encounter. "If an actor comes up and talks about liking my work, that's great" he says, leaning forward, both palms flat on a table. "But when it turns into ... a cause? That's not why I do this."

He slugs some beer from his plastic cup.

"I do this to pick up chicks!"

Dinklage, of course, is now recognized by many, after breaking out in two movies--a leading role in The Station Agent and a scene-stealing turn in Elf--both of which were blessedly free of little-people-are people-too schmaltz. So it is fashionable, if somewhat politically incorrect, to pronounce Dinklage as the Next Big Thing, but if you think that he'll have a long and fruitful career playing Santa's little helpers, then your head must be planted squarely between your own sad buttocks.

"Somebody touched me on the subway once," he says, "and when I turned around, this old woman said, 'Sorry, I just need good luck today.' And I'm not confrontational, but I got a little pissed off at that."

Such attention makes Dinklage something that few young actors are: choosy. "when I was younger," he says, "my guard was up a little bit too much. I didn't want to be a sight gag, didn't want the curly green shoes." There was one concessionan elf role in a commercial-but the money was good and it only aired on ESPN, "and none of my friends ever watch ESPN."

Dinklage, who is 34 years old, grew up in Mendham, New Jersey, where dwarfdom conferred a measure of automatic popularity. But once childhood gave way to adolescence, suddenly it wasn't so cool to be the little guy anymore. "So you wear a lot of black clothes, start smoking and are just angry," he recalls. "You go from listening to Asia to Depeche Mode. ' He laughs. "It's not torture. Just high school."

He went on to study theater at Bennington College, then scraped by in New York doing data entry, landscaping, and playing trumpet in a funk-metal-swing-rap outfit called Whizzy. He fell in with the Malaparte Theater Company, a now defunct troupe of promising roustabouts that included Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard. He landed in Living in Oblivion, which would prove to be the Outsiders of independent film, and met a man named Tom McCarthy, who cast him in a play as an extroverted, drunken Tom Thumb and later cast him in The Station Agent.

It was a small movie about a small circle of people, but it didn't harp on the smallness of its star. Dinklage, as a cynical loner who inherits an abandoned train depot, had to pack away all his native humor and goodwill. He turned in a reserved performance that stood out more for what he expressed than for the few words he said and showcased Dinklage the actor, not Dinklage the little actor. "Peter's a quintessential leading man," says McCarthy. "He's cool, he's funny, he's modest, he's selfdeprecating, and it makes the audience want to follow him through a film."Still, the media seem unsure how to place Dinklage among the woeful cinema tradition of Munchkins and Mini-Me's. Headlines subject him to one wellmeaning slight after another: PETER DINKLAGE LIVES LARGE; LOVE & THE LITTLE BIG MAN; GET SHORTY AN OSCAR. "One [reporter] asked, 'What kind of women are attracted to you?'" Dinklage says. "What do you mean, what kind of women? Women with one eye in the middle of their forehead?"

Fame has come to Dinklage, and with it, the perks and pitfalls. Days after The Station Agent opened last October, a modelstudent claimed in a New York gossip column-falsely, as it turns out-that a flirtatious Dinklage came on strong, trying to woo her back to Brooklyn with him after the two met in a bar. "They come out of the woodwork," he says.

But it's true he's acquired something of a rep as a ladies' man. The tales of amorous encounters have become so plentiful that Dinklage told The Village Voice he was worried he was "starting to sound like a slut." Now, when asked about his burgeoning man-about-town reputation, he turns coy. "I like to have fun with my friends!" he protests. "I don't get arrested! I've never destroyed a hotel room! I like to go home and read a book!" He turns deadpan. "It's not like I'm Robert Evans."

Dinklage is now in rehearsals for a play about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec that's being workshopped at Lincoln Center this spring, he's signed on to star in a film adaptation of Mendel's Dwarf and he just inked a TV development deal with Touchstone Television. "The industry is going to have to change for Peter," says Jon Favreau, who directed Dinklage dropkicking Will Ferrell in Elf, "because he can't change for the industry."

After draining a few more plastic cups, Peter Dinklage walks out of the Turkey's Nest onto the street to go pick up pictures he took in Morocco. "Here are some kids having some fun at my expense," he says casually of one shot. We pass a girl of about 12 walking with her mother; she looks at Peter as she would any little boy, then pulls a double take. Oh, her face says, he's not a boy, he's a man. She's right.