Dwarfism in Media

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Media that depict people with dwarfism, also commonly known as dwarfs or little people. Dwarfism refers to height shorter than 4′10″/147 cm, specifically as a symptom of a medical condition (short stature not caused by a medical condition generally isn't considered dwarfism). A distinction is often made between disproportionate dwarfism (in which either the limbs or torso is atypically small) and proportionate dwarfism (in which the entire body is small, resulting in proportions like those of someone without dwarfism but scaled down). Historically, people with disproportionate dwarfism were known as "dwarfs" and people with proportionate dwarfism were known as "midgets", but nowadays the latter term is considered pejorative. Media depictions of dwarfism have traditionally tended to fall under either Little People Are Surreal or Depraved Dwarf, at least when actors with dwarfism aren't playing aliens or fantasy creatures. More recently, though, depictions of such conditions have become more nuanced.

Not to be confused with the stock fantasy creatures known as dwarves (note the different spelling), for which see Our Dwarves Are All the Same.

Examples:

Films — Animation

• Beauty and the Beast (1991): Despite never being called "dwarf", LeFou shares many characteristics of people with dwarfism (apart from being at least half the size of his fellow villagers, he has a normal-sized head with a shortened torso, abnormally large hands, and facial features completely diverging from those of all other characters). This is averted in the live-action movie, where Josh Gad's version doesn't stand out from the other actors.
• Shrek 1: Lord Farquaad is an evil aristocrat who also happens to be a Depraved Dwarf; a lot of his megalomania seems to be compensation for his short stature. In the film, he seems to be a man with dwarfism, but the musical changes him into being part fantasy dwarf.
• Trolls 1: At adult age, King Gristle Jr. and Bridget are shorter than most other Bergens, which is hinted in their promotional bios to be a cause of dwarfism.

Films — Live-Action

• Blitz (2024): Mickey, a Jewish shelter organizer and labor leader, has dwarfism.
• Cyrano: Unlike the source material, where Cyrano's insecurity is caused by a large nose, here it is caused by having dwarfism.
• Death at a Funeral: In both versions, the male lover of the deceased, who has achondroplasia and was played in both film by Peter Dinklage, attempts to blackmail the deceased's sons for money.
• The Dress: A short film from Poland about a dwarf that works as a cleaning woman in a motel. She's lonely, and a virgin, and she winds up going out on a date with a man of more typical height.
• Even Dwarfs Started Small: Directed by Werner Herzog, the movie features an entire dwarf cast. The dwarves, who are confined to a institution on a remote island, team up to rebel against the guards and director.
• Freaks: One of the main characters is a man with proportionate dwarfism.
• Life Blood: One of the main characters is Felix Shoe, a man with dwarfism, played by Danny Woodburn. His height is only commented on through a couple jokes.
• The Man with the Golden Gun: Scaramanga's butler and personal servant, Nick Nack, is a Depraved Dwarf and The Starscream repeatedly hiring assassins to kill his own boss.
• My Dinner with Hervé: Biopic based on the final days of dwarf French actor Hervé Villechaize (The Man with the Golden Gun, Fantasy Island), portrayed by Peter Dinklage.
• The Orator: The first Samoan film features Fa'afiaula Sagote, a dwarf taro farmer, who sets off to reclaim his father's chiefly status, even if the current retiring chief doesn't believe in his oratory skills.
• Orphan: Esther/Leena is a woman with proportionate dwarfism due to a rare hormone disorder. She can pass as a prepubescent girl due to her small size, and has done so for years.
• Patch Town: Kenny (Ken Hall) is the dwarf henchman of Corrupt Corporate Executive Yuri.
• Pituitary Hunter, a Hong Kong slasher film with a rather weird premise where a masked dwarf is a Serial Killer who enjoys scalping his victims.
• Ship of Fools: The character of Carl Glocken is played by Michael Dunn. Interestingly, his dwarfism isn't acknowledged at any point, which is quite striking in a film from 1965.
• The Station Agent: Peter Dinklage plays lead Finbar McBride, a quiet, withdrawn man with dwarfism who feels ostracized due to his height and seeks solitude at an abandoned train station.
• The Terror of Tiny Town: Released in 1938, it featured an entire cast of people with dwarfism on a full-sized set.
• Tiny Tiptoes: Though neither lead has dwarfism, the film deals with the heroine coming to terms with the fact that her fiance's family does, and that their unborn child may also be born with the condition.
• Total Recall (1990) features Thumbelina, a dwarf prostitute played by stunt woman Debbie Lee Carrington. Despite her stature she proves to be a formidable fighter, killing a villain with a knife to the gut and engaging soldiers in a firefight with a machine gun.
• Willow: The Nelwyns (a fictional fantasy race) were all portrayed by people with disproportionate dwarfism.

Literature

• The Bird King: One of the first refugees to wash up on the shores of the mythical island of Qaf is Mary, a washerwoman with dwarfism. She and her fellow shipwreck survivor Deng were persecuted for their otherness (Mary for being "very short", Deng for being "very black") when their ship was beset by bad weather between England and France — the pair decided to escape in a shore boat before the rest of the passengers could throw them overboard. Mary's presence on Qaf serves to reinforce the surreal qualities of the place, but Mary herself is a kind and practical woman. She goes right back to being a laundress once the refugees establish a proper settlement in the abandoned city of Con.
  The sparrow's voice came, not from a child as she had first thought, but from a woman of very small stature; she was not in a nightdress after all, but in a man's linen undershirt, which fell nearly to her ankles... Her limbs, though short, were well muscled and bore the emblems of hard work: chapped hands and sinews that stood out across her wrists and forearms.
• Geek Love: Olympia Binewski, the narrator, is an albino hunchback dwarf whose family owns a traveling carnival.
• The novel Maybe The Moon by Armistead Maupin, better known for the Tales of the City series, centers around dwarf actress Cadence Roth, who is inspired by Maupin's friend, the dwarf actress Tamara de Treaux, who played the title role of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
• The Princess Bride features Vizzini, a man with dwarfism and a hump on his back, as well as a face described as “angelic”, whose physical attributes are barely remarked on. His character’s defining feature is his powerful criminal mind. The film removes his conditions, making him simply a relatively short man with ordinary posture and features.
• Silent House: Recep, one of the protagonists, is of short build. It is attributed to a horrible beating to the head he received as an infant.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Tyrion Lannister, the youngest son of Tywin Lannister, is a dwarf who is described as having stumpy legs, an overly large head with a squashed face, and heterochromia (one eye is green, the other is black). While he's extremely intelligent and cunning, Beauty Equals Goodness is a widely-held belief in Westeros and thus he's largely treated with derision because of his dwarfism and appearance. Also, he's particularly hated by both his father and his sister Cersei because his mother died while delivering him.
• Stones from the River: Trudi Montag is a dwarf trying to survive in a German town during WWII.
• The Tin Drum: Oskar Matzerath, the protagonist, refuses to grow up and goes through many large events in history with the stature of a small child.
• Willow: Defeat Nockmaar Castle!!: A gamebook adaptation of Willow where the eponymous Hobbit-like Willow reprises his role of Hero Protagonist as he must defeat Queen Bavmorda who plots to Take Over the World.

Live-Action TV

• Another World (1964): The late Brent Collins, who was a dwarf, appeared as Wallingford for a few years prior to his untimely death from a heart attack. He played a friend to Felicia (Linda Dano) and Cass (Stephen Schnetzer), and all three were given a lot of screen time during their time on the show.
• Chiquititas (2013): Giovanni Venturini plays the recurring role of Golias Pequenotti, a lawyer who has dwarfism and frequently appears during court-related plotlines.
• CSI:
  • Season 3's "A Little Murder" features a number of Little People and revolves around determining whether an attendee of a Little Persons Convention who is found dead by hanging has been murdered or if he committed suicide.
  • In "The Chick Chop Flick Shop", Martin Klebba plays a horror film studio employee who hits on Catherine several times during the investigation of the death of one of his co-workers before being murdered himself. He makes a few self-depreciation remarks about being a dwarf and cracks Catherine up when he asks if she's ever been kissed on the back of the thighs by a man who's standing up.
• CSI: NY: In "Uncertainty Rules", Martin Klebba appears as a dwarf wrestler who becomes a murder suspect during the investigation of the deaths of four people by an axe murderer. One of the deceased had been bitten on the shin, which is this guy's trademark. He's innocent; the case is much more complicated than it first seems.
• Game of Thrones: Tyrion Lannister, a dwarf, is played by Peter Dinklage. This portrayal did away with Tyrion's facial abnormalities and severely downplayed his disfiguring from a cut to his face; in the books, Tyrion is left horribly scarred and lost most of his nose, while in the series Tyrion only has scars on his forehead and cheek.
• Good American Family: Natalia Grace has dwarfism.
• Life's Too Short is about a dwarf actor (played by Warwick Davis) who runs a talent agency for short actors.
• Nip/Tuck: Marlowe Sawyer (Peter Dinklage) is a prominent character in Season 4.
• Reservation Dogs: Those Two Guys Mose and Meeko are played by Lil Mike and Funny Bone, a pair of real-life brothers with dwarfism that are rappers both in-show and out.
• Scrubs: The character of Randall first appeared as a fairly simple joke about a patient with dwarfism that showed up in JD’s fantasies, popping out of small places. When he was brought back as a recurring member of the janitorial staff, his height was rarely, if ever, mentioned.
• Seinfeld: The character Mickey Abbott, played by a dwarf named Danny Woodburn, makes several appearances on the show.
  • He gets into physical fights with the 6-foot-tall Kramer.
  • One episode has him getting ostracized by his fellow dwarf peers due to him using lifts on his shoes to make him look taller.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: In the episode "Plato's Stepchildren", the natives of planet Sahndara have telekinetic powers because of a rare mineral in the food. All except for dwarf Alexander (played by Michael Dunn), whose malfunctioning pituitary gland prevents him from absorbing said element. Thus he's the court jester because he can be made a puppet, not because he's a dwarf.
• Swift & Shift Couriers: David Jackman, one of the dispatch workers at the titular organization, is a man with dwarfism. In terms of personality, he's a Jerkass with a Hair-Trigger Temper and a deep raspy voice who insults and picks fights with everyone he meets, pinches a younger female worker's backside and uses his dwarfism to escape punishment in court, and takes a poo in a wastepaper bin when the toilet locks are broken.
• The Traitors (UK): One of the contestants is Scottish Motor Mouth Meryl, whose dwarfism is caused by achondroplasia. She ended up winning the show, becoming quite possibly the first dwarf to win a Reality TV series.
• Twin Peaks: Evil entity The Man from Another Place, who appears to Cooper as a dwarf in a red suit. The actor, Michael J. Anderson, has a genetic disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta (commonly called brittle bone disease) that caused his short stature.
• The Wild Wild West: Recurring villain Dr. Miguelito Loveless (Michael Dunn) has dwarfism and obsessing over it drives most of his psyche.
• The Witcher (2019) has Yarpen Zigrin, a Blood Knight dwarf who leads his own band of dwarfs, played by Jeremy Crawford. He is a recurring character and occasionally an ally to Geralt.
• The Witcher: Blood Origin: Meldof, a female fantasy dwarf, is a main character. She's played by Francesca Mills, an actress who has achondroplasia, an actual form of dwarfism.

Video Games

• Crusader Kings: Dwarfism has been an in-game genetic trait since the second game, and the third game gave dwarfs their own distinct appearance and a few unique events and outcomes that are only triggered by the trait. Characters with dwarfism suffer a penalty to their attractiveness and personal combat ability, but are otherwise no different from any other character.
• Around a year after Willow was released in theaters, it got adapted into a couple of video games by Capcom where Willow himself remains dwarfish as he was in the film and continues to be the main protagonist of both titles:
  • Willow (Arcade)
  • Willow (NES)

Webcomics

• Ennui GO!: Sarah -one of the main characters in Part 1- has dwarfism, which she appears to have inherited from her mother. She's actually one of the most normal members of the cast outside of the fact that she works as a Non-Ironic Clown.

• Dylan Postl, who appears as Hornswoggle, a wrestling leprechaun.