Ever since he was first announced, there has been fervent interest in Peter Dinklage’s role in X-Men: Days Of Future Past. We learned a while ago that he’s playing Bolivar Trask, the scientist who leapt on the mutants-as-threat bandwagon in the 1960s and created the hulking, robotic Sentinels to curb them. Now Dinklage has talked to EW about the character, who he prefers to see as a man with a driving ambition.
“I didn’t want to play the villain,” Dinklage told the magazine. “He’s a man of science. He’s a man of invention. He actually sees what he’s doing as a good thing – his ambition is definitely blind and he’s quite arrogant. He’s strove all his life for a certain respect and attention.”
As usual, actors tend to see their characters’ point of view, even when everyone else might consider them a psychotic nut-job with a god complex. Trask has had the luxury of having been many things during the various X-Men comics storyline, and there’s certainly a case to be made for his side of the argument, even if things seem to go apocalyptically wrong on his watch. And it’s not just the X-Men he’s facing: “He’s up against Richard Nixon,” Dinklage says. “He’s got some hurdles.”
There’s more on Trask and his company on the viral website set up for the film. And X-Men: Days Of Future Past itself will be out on May 22 in the UK.