2. Tyrion Lannister - Game Of Thrones (2011-2015)
Let's get this one out of the way fast, yeah? As the blood-thirsty, booze-swilling, womanising and often strangely poetic Tyrion Lannister, Dinklage has come to personify everything people love about the HBO show. It's innately fantastical, yet imbued with a dark underbelly and dramatic reality that makes it play more like Deadwood than The Lord Of The Rings. Dinklage's turn as Lannister is probably the most concise and compartmentalised incarnation of Thrones's strengths, spouting off memorable one-liners with reckless abandon and utterly convincing as a fearsome warrior despite his unconventional frame. It's of course a great hook, the show's most masculine character being physically so much slighter than his peers, but Dinklage hasn't fallen back on the staple, indeed even when side-lined in captivity, the character routinely nabbed episodes, finding the right balance between empathy stirring humour and true, gritty pathos. It's a complex performance that can also be distilled to a handful of T-shirt shifting slogans, and in Hollywood that's a powerful combination. In other words, he's iconic.