Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis

by Davis, Warwick

  The “plot” involved a bloodthirsty leprechaun (who spoke almost exclusively in rhyming couplets), a pot of gold, lost teenagers, a deserted house, and a magical four-leaf clover. My nemesis was a very attractive young woman, who, at the end of the film, would have the dubious honor of sending me to my doom at the bottom of a well. Her name meant nothing to me then: Jennifer Aniston.

  Ask Jennifer about Leprechaun today and she will deny everything. I don’t blame her. Once during filming, when Ron Howard called me and asked what I was up to in L.A., I admit that even I was a bit reluctant to confess. When I finally told him, his advice was, “Whatever you do, don’t make another one.”

  After I’d agreed to do it, I had to audition for the all-important “moneymen,” the producers who were financing the film. But while they may have been financially astute, they weren’t terribly creative. They all sat in line behind a table in true X-Factor style while Mark and I came out and did our thing, talked through the plot and played out a few scenes. I’d developed a special “Leprechaun voice,” more of a creature voice with a hint of Irish than a full accent.

  The suits seemed to be happy that the film would make money and we started shooting at Valencia Studios, just as they were clearing out all the gear from Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

  We also shot scenes at the Big Sky Ranch, where Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons were both filmed. These were insanely popular TV dramas and it felt a little blasphemous to be turning these sets, known for their incredibly saccharine family-friendly dramas, into a comedy horror location – especially the scene in the local store where I cruelly crush the store owner’s chest and stomach by hopping on him with a pogo stick. Prairie was also famous for its opening credits where three children run down a hill. I broke a cop’s neck at the bottom of that hill. Oh yes, this was quality horror.

  The suits were quite hands-on. They were always on the set, watching where every penny was going. There was one who came to visit while I was in the makeup trailer being transformed into the Leprechaun. Gabe Bartalos, the makeup artist, was a boomingly loud, dark-haired giant of Hungarian descent who was completely crazy and a real delight to work with. He held complete mastery over horror makeup and had worked on several cult horror classics, such as Brain Dead and the Cremaster Cycle, an extraordinary film/art project that earned a special exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

  On that particular day, Gabe had been showing me various things he’d created for the film. “Take a look at this,” he said, proudly passing me a little cardboard box. I opened it and inside, lying on a bed of cotton wool, was a finger that had been severed, or rather yanked out of a hand; it had all the tendons trailing from it. It was even wearing a ring and looked absolutely 100 percent realistic, and I said so.

  It was then that one of the producers knocked at the door. “Hang on a minute,” I said, as Gabe went to answer, “watch this!” I took the finger and pretended that when the door opened it had somehow ripped off my hand. “Aaaaaaargh!” I screamed, waving the severed appendage in the producer’s face. I looked insane, I was half-naked and half-made-up as the Leprechaun.

  The producer’s reaction was not what I had been expecting.

  He stayed completely deadpan and said, “When I was in college, I was fooling around in the shower and when I jumped up to throw something over the top of the shower curtain, I caught my ring finger on the rail, slipped and fell and ripped it clean off. It looked exactly like that.”

  I looked down and saw that his ring finger was indeed missing.

  A few days later Gabe showed me a severed hand. “Yes, very nice,” I said, and left it well alone.

  Work on Leprechaun had started so quickly that Sam and I hadn’t been able to rent a car and now, thanks to my hectic work schedule, we didn’t have time to. Los Angeles is known as the City of the Car; it wasn’t the sort of place you can get about easily on foot. This left us feeling a bit trapped in our hotel. When I mentioned this to crazy makeup artist Gabe at the hotel, he threw me his car keys. “I’m flying to New York for the weekend, why don’t you use my Caddy while I’m away?”

  “Well . . . um.”

  I had thought it was obvious why not, but after a while cabin fever had really taken hold, so I decided to have a go; after all, temptation breeds innovation. I piled the seat with pillows from the hotel so I could see out of the window. I then took off my right shoe and tied a sturdy shoebox lengthwise to my foot. I reckoned that this would be enough for me to press down on the accelerator and the brake.

  Sam decided to join me.

  “So,” she said, “where are we going to go?”

  “Erm . . . to the shop.”

  I set off down Wilshire Boulevard in the Cadillac, looking for a 7-Eleven. I had no idea what I was going to get when I got there – I was doing this for the experience, not because I needed a gallon of milk and a box of Oreos.

  What made it tricky, however, was the fact that it was very hard to judge how hard to push down to brake and accelerate, so my progress was very jerky. I just hoped the cardboard box would survive the journey.

  Wilshire Boulevard is twelve miles long and one of the main east-west roads in L.A. It’s named after Gaylord Wilshire (shame they didn’t choose the first name – Gaylord Boulevard has a much nicer ring to it), who cleared a path in his barley field there in the 1890s. If he had seen his road one hundred years on, I’m sure it would have blown Gaylord’s mind. Lined with skyscrapers, one part of it is known as Miracle Mile – it’ll be a miracle if you survive the journey because it’s so congested and it contains one infamous ten-lane intersection. This, combined with all the neon lights, must make Wilshire Boulevard look like a Christmas tree from outer space.

  Unfortunately, I missed all this and somehow sailed through the ten-lane intersection without knowing it. I was far too busy trying to find the brake and accelerator with my cardboard box.

  I drove past the spectacular Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, and past the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the place where they hand out those little Oscar statuettes) and daydreamed about receiving the Oscar for Leprechaun. “I don’t know what to say, it was so unexpected. This just goes to show what a little guy with big dreams can achieve.”

  We eventually spotted a grocery store, found a parking space, and I was about to climb out when I realized the shoebox was still fastened to my foot. I removed it and then searched for my shoe.

  “Oh, bugger.”

  I’d forgotten it.

  But that wasn’t going to stop me. I’d come this far. After all, I’d just driven a Cadillac through central L.A. using a shoebox and I’d be damned if I’d turn back now.

  So, I emerged from the huge car, one shoe on and one shoe off, and tried to ignore the stares from the people in the grocery store. Being in L.A., I presumed they saw a lot of strange sights, but obviously never a one-shoed little person.

  Sam, who was giggling at my predicament, bought some juice and snacks. I limped my way out to the Cadillac, clambered back in, retied my shoebox, and drove us, very carefully, back to the hotel. By the time we got back I was exhausted.

  “Well,” Sam said, “that was interesting.”

  I don’t know about that but it certainly cured my cabin fever.

  During the filming of Leprechaun I had a number of scenes with Jennifer Aniston. You could tell even then she was going places. She was extremely professional, knew her way around a film set, and nailed everything on the first take, an essential ability in a movie like Leprechaun, which had a tiny budget and a limited shooting time of just three weeks.

  One scene involved me chasing Jennifer through an old people’s home using a wheelchair. When Mark had written the script, he hadn’t realized just how impractical this would be – I could barely reach the wheels of the wheelchair, let alone pump them around with my arms at the necessary speed.

  The answer was to shoot at twelve frames per second. When the film w
as played back it looked like a leprechaun version of Benny Hill was chasing a terrified Jennifer Aniston up and down the nursing home corridors while she screamed over a standard horror soundtrack. In reality, Jennifer ran in slow motion so I could keep up.

  Although stuntmen were available, I did most of my own stunts. At one point I crashed through a fence on my roller skates, leaving a leprechaun-shaped hole behind. I also got to drive a superpowered go-kart in a car chase with the cops. We had to go back and reshoot more violent versions of several scenes after the suits declared that a scary children’s movie would not be as profitable as an adult horror film. Mark obliged and turned the gore up to eleven.

  Everyone on set got on well, we had a good time making it, there were no egos, and we were all just grateful to be working. I never really got to know Jennifer personally, only professionally. When I was in costume it was quite tricky – attempts at idle chit-chat really don’t work when you’re dressed as an evil leprechaun. Once she won her part in Friends, for a while I entertained the futile hope that I’d get the call from the show’s producers to make a special guest-star appearance as the Leprechaun.

  A lot of the plot of Leprechaun was suspiciously similar to my childhood favorite Scooby-Doo (Mark had written for Hanna-Barbera, the makers of said program). It involved four kids hunting for a four-leaf clover, the only thing that would kill me. They finally succeed when one of them wraps up a clover in some chewing gum and catapults it into my open mouth. I swallow, choke, stagger to the edge of a well (where the wall is partially broken), and start to decompose and then tumble back down into the bottomless hole. All that was missing was for me to shout, “And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids!”

  For the decomposing scene, I had to wear an acrylic jawbone that Gabe inserted into my prosthetics before supergluing several tubes to my body. All sorts of goo, gunk, and smoke were blown out through these tubes to make it look as if I was melting. It was actually somebody’s job to smoke a cigar and puff smoke into one of the tubes, so it looked as if my chest was burning as I dissolved.

  We filmed from 4 p.m. until 6 a.m. every day on location in the high desert outside L.A., where the wind chill brought the temperature down to below freezing. Contrary to what you might expect, the layers of foam prosthetics didn’t protect me at all. The cold crept up through my little shoes, up my legs, through my Leprechaun hands, and straight up my arms like a rapidly rising icy tide.

  The schedule was relentless. I’d get back to the hotel at 7 a.m. where I’d have breakfast and then, after a day’s sleep, upon arriving back on set I’d have breakfast again. It was exhausting; I had to be in bed by 8 a.m. or I wouldn’t make it through the next day’s shoot.

  I was delighted when filming finally wrapped and we could go home. I’d loved making Leprechaun but it had been a grueling few weeks.

  Another reason to get back to the UK was to see a genetic counselor who would explain some of the complications Sam and I would face when trying to start a family. We’d never even heard of such a thing until Lloyd had fallen ill and a doctor suggested that we should consider it.

  We each had our own reasons for being small; mine was an extremely rare genetic condition that occurs in about one in a million people called spondyloepexpalidcious.

  No, hang on, that’s not it. Even the most experienced doctors have to take a few runs at the pronunciation: spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita, SED for short (thank goodness). SED is an inherited disorder of bone growth where the ends of the bones don’t fully develop and this results in short stature and some skeletal abnormalities. There are a host of other connected problems that people with SED may or may not have, such as a cleft palate, club foot (which I’d had), high risk of retinal detachment, and potential neck problems.

  Sam has achondroplasia, the more common type of dwarfism, also a genetic condition. We had no idea what the effect of combining our genes would be; medical knowledge of my condition and the effect of having children with Sam was literally nonexistent. In fact, as numerous doctors told us, we were the first such couple they’d ever come across. The doctors in Nottingham tried to console us with the fact that they had learned a great deal from Lloyd; his was the first case of its kind in the world, they said.

  Researchers later discovered that when both of our genes are combined, there’s a one in four chance that our children could be tall, or could be like Sam, or like me, or share both of our genetic material. The fourth option was the most dangerous and that was what had happened to Lloyd.

  So when Sam became pregnant again, we were cautiously excited. Sam went through another textbook pregnancy but this time our baby was born “asleep” at University College Hospital in central London. We named him George. The loss was almost too painful to bear, we were devastated, and I left the hospital after the birth, without even seeing George, just to walk the streets and to try and clear my head. It seemed crazy that in the world outside, everything was just carrying on as normal.

  When I came back to the hospital, Sam, who was still really weak, said, “You should see him, Warwick, it will help.”

  Reluctantly, I agreed. I thought that seeing our son would make the pain all the worse.

  But it didn’t. I was able to say hello and good-bye. It was exactly what I needed to do. Although my heart ached, he looked so perfect, as if he really were sleeping.

  On what was another agonizing drive home, I stopped when we were just outside Peterborough. “Thank you,” I said, hugging Sam, “thank you for making me see my son.”

  These experiences drew Sam and me even closer. We ended up learning things about ourselves we would never have learned had we not lost Lloyd and George. Of course, these are the sorts of lessons no one should ever have to learn and I wish this was something we hadn’t had to go through, but in the process we discovered just how much we were able to cope with. It also convinced us that we truly were soul mates; that we were meant to be together because together we could face anything.

  Our experience with Lloyd also left Sam and me passionate about helping Peterborough’s Special Care Baby Unit buy more ventilators so that sick babies and their parents wouldn’t have to be transferred for treatment elsewhere as we were. Whenever I donate my time to a good cause (opening a school fete, a local fair, a charity auction, etc.), the organizers usually ask if there’s anything they can do in return, so I ask them to make a donation or organize a collection for the baby unit.

  Our decision to try again was by no means taken lightly. I worried that the risk of becoming attached to another baby might have been too much to bear. I hadn’t expected the bond I felt toward Lloyd and George to be as intense as it was so soon after they were born and I wasn’t sure I could cope with the pain of loss again.

  Sam, meanwhile, was adamant: we would have a child.

  In the meantime, Leprechaun was released in 620 cinemas across North America to overwhelmingly terrible reviews. One reviewer described it as “Mildly diverting horror silliness” full of “ill-advised slapstick twists,” while another said it was “incredibly bad and boring” and that “Jennifer Aniston shows that, in different circumstances, she might be competent.” The New York Times, however, did point out that “it does feature what is possibly a movie first: a murder committed by a leprechaun riding a pogo stick.” Excellent!

  Fortunately, cinemagoers disagreed with the majority of the critics and Leprechaun soon achieved a notorious degree of popularity among teenagers. It cost about $900,000 to make and took ten times that at the U.S. box office on its first release.

  Mark and I remain proud of it to this day, and I’m always delighted when people mention the Leprechaun in lists of other classic horror characters. Alongside Freddy, Chucky, and Jason, I’m in good company.

  It was one of those films CDS Productions would have loved to have made if only we’d had the idea – and if Leprechaun had come out when I was fourteen or fifteen I would have been first in line to see it at Ewell
cinema.

  As it was a commercial success, the producers decided to finance a sequel (Leprechaun 2: One Wedding and Lots of Funerals) and although Mark was attached to the project he wasn’t going to direct this time; that would fall to a chap called Rodman Flender, who’d directed a lot of television and would go on to helm the teen-horror movie Idle Hands starring the then almost unknown eighteen-year-old actress Jessica Alba. (The plot of Idle Hands concerned a young man whose right hand becomes possessed by Satan – yeah, yeah, we’ve all used that excuse!)

  I was amazed that I was now starring in my own quirky horror franchise and was delighted to sign on the dotted line for Leprechaun 2.

  Once again, we had an extremely low budget and just three weeks in which to shoot the film. We had to shoot relentlessly through the night in an operation that was run like a production line and we whizzed through several pages of script every night. Looking back, comparing Leprechaun 2 to Harry Potter (not something many people do, I realize), the process couldn’t be more different. On Harry Potter a whole day can be spent on just one shot.