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Peter Dinklage is afraid of his iPhone

But give him time, he's only had it six months. The "Game of Thrones" star talks tech on the sidelines of Sundance, where his new movie "Rememory" debuts.

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Joan E. Solsman Former Senior Reporter
Joan E. Solsman was CNET's senior media reporter, covering the intersection of entertainment and technology. She's reported from locations spanning from Disneyland to Serbian refugee camps, and she previously wrote for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. She bikes to get almost everywhere and has been doored only once.
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Joan E. Solsman
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Peter Dinklage, best known for "Game of Thrones," steals a memory-recording machine in "Rememory," premiering this week at Sundance.

 C. Flanigan/Getty Images

Do Peter Dinklage a favor: Please don't film him eating out with your iPhone .

For his latest film, Dinklage switched from the pseudo-medieval setting of "Game of Thrones" to a not-so-distant future with groundbreaking technology. "Rememory," premiering this week at the Sundance Film Festival, imagines current-day era with a machine that can record and replay anyone's unfiltered memories.

It's a cautionary take on how technology can ... well, ruin our lives. Even with such a bleak take on tech, playing the film's main character didn't sway Dinklage's personal affinity with technology -- mostly because he's already pretty skeeved out by it to begin with.

More from Sundance

"I just got an iPhone about six months ago, friends made fun of me," he said in an interview. "I'm afraid of it."

Part of his aversion is generational. At 47, the actor said he's lived most of his life without digital appendages and is at "that strange age of being nostalgic" for a time when constant connection didn't exist.

Part of his distance from tech stems from worries about how it can degrade our ability to relate.

Fans approach him to ask to take a picture, he said, but end the interaction there. "We're not even allowing a memory to sink in," he said. "They'll have proof of meeting me, but ... there wasn't anything to remember, because all you did was just take a picture."

Tech can also make fame a bit like a science experiment, where Dinklage is the lab rat.

"Because I'm in the public eye, people use it on me all the time, I feel paranoid about it," he said. "People are videotaping me in restaurants, it's really weird."

But he's not a total Luddite.

"At the end of the day, just the ability to watch a movie that I want on a teeny screen in my hotel, that's joyous to me," he said.

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