Does Bradley Cooper play a halfling in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves? We debate the details of the D&D movie with Chris Pine and Hugh Grant.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is chock-full of references aimed directly at the most dedicated D&D players. But it has at least one thing all audiences can enjoy: an unexpected, utterly absurd cameo from a well-known actor.
With all cameos, less is more. But in the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, where every person has a set of numerical statistics associated with, for example, how well they can flirt, even the briefest appearance can inspire curiosity.
So let’s categorize Honor Among Thieves’ big — well, OK, not big, but genuinely funny cameo.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.]
Honor Among Thieves’ little surprise is the sudden appearance of Bradley Cooper. He’s an actor well known for playing a different diminutive character, but this cameo is a smaller role in every sense. When our gold-hearted adventurers drop by the old stomping grounds of Holga the barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez), she visits the home she once shared with her ex-husband Marlamin in an attempt to rekindle what they once had.
Here, Honor Among Thieves reveals two things: First, Marlamin is played by Bradley Cooper. Second, Marlamin is only about 3 feet tall. The comedy of the scene lies in the way Cooper and Rodriguez maintain painstakingly straight faces as they discuss the dissolution of their relationship, and the fact that Marlamin has moved on. These are, in fine romantic-drama style, two people who sacrificed everything to be together, then realized they weren’t that compatible at all. It’s just that one of them is a fur-and-leather-wearing barbarian, and the other is a guy whose wee legs are dangling off the seat of his human-size armchair.
Honor Among Thieves doesn’t hang out with Marlamin long enough to explicitly call out his species in the way it does for half-elf Simon or tiefling Doric. What is this small dude meant to be, within the Dungeons & Dragons canon? It’s up to us, the staff of Polygon, the nexus of gaming and entertainment, to make our own call — applying the canonical descriptions from the Player’s Handbook of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, the source book the world of Honor Among Thieves was derived from.
