NEW YORK -- Jeff Bridges from "Iron Man" isn't the only actor who lost his locks for the sake of Summer of 2008. Peter Dinklage sacrificed his mop of dark hair to play Trumpkin the Red Dwarf in "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian."

He still had to spend three hours a day in the makeup chair undergoing another transformation as his head was freshly shaved, colored and aged, his eyebrows dyed, a fake nose applied and a reddish human-hair wig and matching beard fashioned from yak hair glued on.

At day's end, it would take an hour to strip everything off.

"I made the choice to shave my head and they just kept up on it. I could have worn a bald cap but bald caps are so hot, it's like wearing a wool cap. They don't let any of your head breathe, so it's much cooler to shave my head."

As for what yak hair feels like, it's a little brittle, coarse and itchy, not to mention a favorite of the sand flies in New Zealand where part of the movie was shot.

"A lot of little critters out there are making beautiful places a little harder to enjoy," he said, adding he paid a price for being a self-described hippie at heart. "It's my darn fault because I don't like to spray myself with those little insecticide things. I try to be natural about things and love my environment and I'm anti- all that stuff."

Which meant the sand flies flocked to his beard.

"They loved that beard. I'd have, like, hundreds of them at the end of the day we'd have to pick out. If it wasn't so itchy, it would be funny," he said from a seat near the windows of a high-rise hotel where the city literally was at his feet.

Dinklage, however, wasn't complaining about the movie that allowed him to travel to New Zealand and other destinations vacationers pay top dollar to see.

Besides, he was director Andrew Adamson's first choice in a movie that is far grander in scope than anything he's done so far. In recent years, Dinklage tussled with Will Ferrell in "Elf," turned heads as despondent loner Finbar McBride in "The Station Agent" and played evil Simon Barsinister in last summer's "Underdog."

It wasn't that he shied away from films of "Narnia's" magnitude but the timing wasn't right or he didn't click with the material. On "Prince Caspian," he said, the pieces fell into place.

"And I just really liked Andrew. He sort of won me over. If I had any remaining doubts, [Adamson] erased them" when the director met him in Los Angeles a few months before shooting started.

"I still had my reservations. I hadn't read the book yet, obviously hadn't read the script because they were still working on it, and he had to do the convincing and he brought me into this sort of think tank where they were doing the storyboard animation, and it was a world I'd never been a part of before. He's such a creative force that I was smitten."

Not only that, but the animators were using his face as they visualized the character. "Well, I can't say no now," he thought.

Stage veteran Dinklage will spend part of the summer starring in a new production of "Uncle Vanya" at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. His wife, Erica Schmidt, will direct and give him back what he calls the "crackle, crackle" only a crisp stage play can provide.

He also hopes to return to his indie roots before joining the cast of the next "Narnia" movie, "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," near year's end. As it turns out, Dinklage had read "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" when he was younger but stopped there.

"I guess I got distracted by 'Lord of the Rings' or something at that age. Actually Tolstoy at a young age. ... Bring me my Tolstoy," he told a roomful of writers earlier in the day, hamming it up alongside actress Anna Popplewell.

"Then, of course, when I was going to work on this, I read the book and it was great. But I think the beauty of what Andrew has done is -- and I think it freaks out a lot of Narnia fans -- he's not completely faithful.

"I think successful movies that are based on books are their own thing. I think if you're too faithful, word by word, character trait by character trait to a fault, I think it can hurt the movie. And Andrew sort of has created, based on the books, his own, which I really like."

Yak hair, sand flies and all.