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

by Davis, Warwick

  My verbal attack on Ricky as I started to punch him was ad-libbed: “You git,” and then, scrabbling to add something else, “You fat git!” Afterward Ricky looked at me, grinning. It was pretty funny, I guess, especially coming from me, with my rather more obvious physical dissimilarity.

  “Sorry, Ricky, I don’t know why I said that.”

  He took it in his stride.

  We did this scene over and over again. I was supposed to punch Ricky in the stomach and as he was wearing padding (which added to his tubbiness) I could hit him as hard as I liked. During one take I really let fly and really caught him a beauty. He yelled at me to stop. He’d forgotten to put on the padding and I’d caught him perfectly in the solar plexus.

  I didn’t have any padding in the scene where Ricky knocked me unconscious by accidentally kneeing me in the face. Once his knee had “connected” with my chin, I was supposed to throw myself backward to the floor. Thanks to Laurel and Hardy and almost three decades of playing characters who fell over a lot (often accidentally), I was able to do this pretty well. Nonetheless, we practiced over and over again with a stunt coordinator. Ricky tried all sorts of lines after I’d fallen to the floor until he finally settled on the one he wanted.

  Once the cameras started to roll, adrenaline took over and I said I was happy to bounce off the floor for as many takes as it took. Twenty-three takes later, we were done.

  The next morning, I opened my eyes.

  “Oooaaargh!”

  I was in excruciating pain.

  “Oh my God, I am never going to do that again.”

  My body was covered in bruises, my muscles were twisted, and my joints were swollen. It took me an hour to get to the edge of the bed. Now I understood why they say that comedy is all about pain.

  While we were filming Extras, the England football squad were about to play Portugal in the World Cup. Ricky, Steve, and I made an appearance on BBC1 just before the match. Ricky appeared as himself, pretending he was in Germany, and introduced Steve, who was wearing the England kit, as Peter Crouch (at six-foot-seven, Peter and Steve are the same height). I was waiting off camera, ready for Ricky to introduce me – as Wayne Rooney.

  Ricky then says that we’re not the best choice for playing up front because of the height difference. Steve and I explain that we’ve devised a new system.

  When Ricky kicks over the ball, Steve lifts me up so I’m able to head it into the back of the net. Steve imitates Peter Crouch’s signature robotic dance and asks me for a high five. I can’t reach so I get into a bit of a strop and throw my boots at him.

  When the cameras cut back to the studio, Gary Lineker was sitting with former Arsenal and England star Ian Wright. Ian was laughing uncontrollably and blurted out, “I don’t know what it is about little people like that, I just love ’em, man, I love ’em.”

  Steve later complained: “Out of all the stuff I’ve ever done, The Office, Extras, the radio shows, my mum thinks that this is my best work – a dodgy impression of Peter Crouch.”

  I was chuffed to bits when I saw the finished version of Extras. I was delighted with my performance and that we had highlighted some of the unnecessarily awkward interactions between little and normal-sized people. Although Darren Lamb’s reaction “Oh. Midget!” was grossly exaggerated and played brilliantly by Steve, it contained echoes of what I sometimes encounter in my everyday life.

  And then a little seed, one that had been planted some time ago, suddenly took root.

  I’d had a meeting with a documentary maker several months before. He’d wanted to do a Louis Theroux–style documentary where he and a cameraman would live with me and my family and film our day-to-day lives. I liked the guy and said it was intriguing but that I couldn’t do it. Whenever we go out as a family, our size always becomes a significant part of our day, whether we go to the shops, a museum, a restaurant, and so on. Our home is the one place where we can really be ourselves and not worry about anything else.a That space and privacy are just too precious for me to give up.

  Besides, we live in an ordinary house in a small village near Peterborough, it’s very nice but nothing is gold-plated. I certainly don’t have a driver or custom-made designer-label clothing – unless you count Next Kids or Mothercare. I put out my own rubbish and take my kids to school; it’s incredibly ordinary and if I had agreed to a TV documentary it would have been yawn-inducing.

  “But hang on,” I thought, “wouldn’t it be amazing to make a mockumentary that I could fully control? Wouldn’t it be fun to play with people’s misconceptions of me as a little person and actor?” I started to get excited. I could really go overboard and give my character an enormous ego, a huge car with a chauffeur, an insufferable personality . . . I’d get as far away from my own reality as I could.

  This idea really took hold. I started working it out, taking scenes from my everyday life and putting a very conceited, obnoxious, and bigheaded version of my own character into them. Inspired by shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm and Alan Partridge, I created a monster, someone who thought he was more famous than he actually was, who pushed his terrible ideas for films down people’s throats and who tried to steal the limelight whenever he could. I was surprised to find myself laughing uncontrollably as I wrote. I showed the scenes to a few friends and got some genuinely good feedback.

  I tinkered with the idea whenever I had some spare time. I once sucked half the ink out of a ballpoint pen because I was concectrating too much. Once I thought I’d done as much as I could, I decided that I’d send it to Mr. Gervais to get some feedback, as this was in his area of expertise and was in part inspired by Extras and The Office. If Ricky told me I was on the right track then that would give me all the encouragement I needed to keep going.

  I sent him a text and he replied telling me to send it for the attention of Stephen at their office. I popped it in the post in August and then forgot about it.

  Life went on, and work kept me really busy. After Extras, I began panto season in Manchester. While there I was asked to audition for the part of Nikabrik in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

  “They’ve seen you in Leprechaun,” my agent told me.

  “Oh dear,” I thought, “that doesn’t bode well.” As it turned out, my Leprechaun experience proved to be instrumental in my getting the part, as it showed I could act my socks off while covered in prosthetics.

  In Prince Caspian, my character had a long beard (it was incredibly itchy and caught on everything – swords, tree branches, other actors, etc.), a false nose, and full-face gelatin makeup, which was used to age me. This was pretty interesting, if slightly spooky as I saw myself steadily transformed into how I’d look in about forty years’ time.

  Oscar-winner Howard Berger designed the makeup. I used to think of him as the sensible version of Gabe, my crazed Leprechaun makeup artist – until early one morning when I entered the makeup trailer to find Howard and makeup assistant Sarah Rubano dancing like nutters to the “Ewok Celebration” song from the soundtrack to Return of the Jedi. He had also declared his love for Ewoks by scrawling bizarre messages to that effect on the mirror in black eyeliner. As the Roman philosopher Seneca once said: “There is no great genius without a touch of madness.” I rest my case.

  Although Prince Caspian was part of the Narnia film franchise, I wouldn’t be around for long. Poor Nikabrik is stabbed in the back and killed by Trumpkin, his supposed friend (played by Peter Dinklage). Still, Nikabrik was a great character and I always relished the chance to die on screen.

  As it turned out, I overdid it slightly and died like a shot cowboy in an old western. As I was “stabbed” in the back I opened my eyes wide in horror before falling to my knees, pausing and then falling forward with a heavy thud. It was edited for length in the final cut.

  This multimillion-dollar production was quite different from the BBC version I’d acted in years before – everything was so much bigger. Aslan’s stone table (Aslan is the Great Lion, the central character in
Narnia) had been about the size of the average dining table in the BBC production. In the Hollywood version it was as big as a house.

  A large part of filming took place in Prague. I stayed in a fabulous apartment in town and the studio was nearby. We then moved out into the Czech countryside, to the former industrial town of Ústi, to film some of the battle scenes. I was really looking forward to this until I discovered that I was going to need an inoculation.

  “An inoculation? What on earth for?” I asked when I found out. We were in Europe after all. As I’ve already mentioned, I never travel anywhere that required inoculations if I can help it. It’s quite ironic really; I live in mortal fear of all things small and poisonous – insects, snakes, and lizards – you name it, I’m afraid of it.

  It turned out that the area was full of ticks that could give you Lyme disease – also known as tickborne meningoencephalitis, a potentially fatal illness (1 percent of cases result in death with 10 to 20 percent of cases suffering permanent neurological damage).

  As it turned out I wasn’t on set when the nurse turned up to inoculate everybody. By the time I found out and tracked her down it was too late – the immunity took several days to kick in.

  So I traveled to Ústi without being inoculated. “Just keep off the grass,” the nurse told me, “that’s where they live. Avoid fields and bushes and you’ll be fine.”

  The scene we were filming involved us returning from battle, wounded and exhausted, to Aslan’s How (a full-scale set of which had actually been constructed). I made sure I stuck to the dirt and stone path leading to the How, which was surrounded by fields.

  Then, to my horror, director Andrew Adamson decided he needed us all to take a step back onto the grass so he could get a nice shot of us approaching from a distance.

  “Oh no,” I thought. As far as I was concerned those fields were shark-infested waters. I tucked my trousers into my socks and waited until the last possible minute before stepping gingerly onto the grass on tiptoe. My eyes roamed the fields looking for any sign of advancing ticks but I saw nothing.

  After a successful day’s filming I returned to the hotel room and got in the shower. I was soaping away when my hand ran over a lump on my bottom. After climbing on a chair and twisting around in front of a mirror I saw with horror that a massive black tick had clamped itself firmly to my posterior.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaargh!”

  I paced up and down the room. “What do I do? What do I do?” After making a few frantic phone calls I was put through to the unit nurse.

  She had an extraordinarily thick Eastern European accent.

  “Votever you do, do not touch it! I’ll be right over.”

  Her urgent tone both impressed and terrified me. She took forever to arrive and I paced up and down the room, wearing out the carpet (I could hardly sit down, after all).

  Finally, the nurse arrived and I immediately bared my bum at her without so much as a “How do you do?”

  “Oooooh,” she said, obviously impressed, “zat’s a big vone.”

  “Thank you,” I replied, “but what about the tick?”

  She extracted a pair of tweezers from her bag.

  “Ve must not let ze head stay inzide your behind.”

  She crouched over me and I could feel the tugging as the tick resisted the pull of the tweezers. I felt terribly queasy.

  Suddenly there was a soft “pop.”

  “Got it”! she exclaimed triumphantly.

  She was right. It was massive. I even took a photo of it. I was given a course of antibiotics and had to wait for a worrying few weeks to be certain I didn’t have any symptoms of Lyme disease.

  From that day forth I was known on set as Tickabrik.

  In December I was suddenly struck down with a horrendous flu. I was also waiting to hear whether I’d got the part in the sixth Harry Potter film, so I was in a lousy mood. Mindful of this, I still kept one feverish eye on my iPhone.

  I awoke from an agitated sleep and staggered, iPhone in hand, to the toilet. As I sat down I saw I had a voicemail from an unknown number.

  Could that be the studio? I fumbled with the screen and pressed play.

  “Hi, it’s Ricky Gervais here. With me is Stephen Merchant.”

  I’d just been listening to one of their podcasts, so I assumed I’d accidentally pressed play on the iPod. Then I thought I was hallucinating.

  “Warwick, we’ve read your thing, and we loved it. I loved the conceit, I thought it was tremendous. There were proper laugh-out-loud moments. What are you doing with it? Give me a call. Anything you want to add, Stephen?”

  “Yes, thanks Ricky, we thought it was great, loved it. We were only sorry it was so short . . . Oops, no offense.”

  Both of them started giggling.

  I couldn’t believe it. Here were comedy heroes of mine telling me I’d made them laugh.

  Suddenly, thanks to Ricky, a project that had been not much more than a pipe dream was at the top of everyone’s to-do list. I couldn’t help but grin – one of the greatest accolades of my career had come while I was sitting on the toilet.

  “I always felt we’d underused you in Extras,” Ricky told me when I called him back. “Look,” he continued, “I want to executive produce this, okay?”

  A couple of weeks later I was standing at reception in BBC Television Center with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant (we really stood out from the crowd), waiting to see Mark Freeland, Head of Comedy. I had another one of those out of body experiences. I looked down on myself and asked, “How on earth did this happen”?

  We were shown into Mark’s office. I’d brought a DVD of a few short clips to illustrate the concept. All four of us use Apple Macs and we all had the usual chat about how marvelous these machines are as I pulled my MacBook Pro out of my bag. The DVD refused to play. I ejected it and reinserted it several times, all the while apologizing, bright red and sweating profusely.

  Of course, just at that moment, the DVD refused to play. I ejected it and reinserted it a couple of times. Nothing. I restarted the thing, all the while apologizing, bright red and sweating profusely.

  Why me? Why at this moment in my life? I felt as if I were making them all look like idiots for singing the praises of Apple and now here I was, demonstrating the exact opposite. Finally, just as I was about to surrender once and for all, it started playing.

  I’d been so traumatized by the whole event that I hardly noticed that the three of them had started laughing.

  Surely, I thought, they’re just being nice? Laughing out of politeness. Surely it’s not that funny?

  Then Ricky turned to Mark and said, “This is BAFTA-winning stuff.”

  Holy cow.

  We left the office with a development commission, which meant we could develop the script into a full episode and do some casting. My head spun. I hardly knew what to say or what to do next. Suddenly I was on the verge of having my very own TV series.

  After the meeting, Ricky and Stephen immediately began to refine the idea. The show (called Life’s Too Short) stars me playing a different version of myself – who has just divorced his average-sized wife. Essentially, it’s about me struggling to rebuild my life and career as well as dealing with the day-to-day issues that being short throws up.

  To say this was a subject close to my heart would be a massive understatement. This, to me, was really powerful comedy, the best kind there is. Besides, it wasn’t as if we were short on material.

  When the time came to shoot the pilot I’d learned the half-hour script so well I could recite it back to front, upside down, and in Ewokese. There was no way I was going to risk fluffing my lines in front of Ricky and the entire crew. Besides, I needed to focus on my performance, and this is a lot easier when you know your lines backward.

  I was quietly confident that it would go well, but a dark and troubling thought lurked in the back of my mind: a great deal was resting on my small shoulders. Ricky, Stephen, and the BBC had put all their faith in me. If I somehow
managed to mess up then there was every possibility they would recast or shelve the whole series.

  Also, by the time we came to shoot the pilot, word had spread and the media world had turned their attention on multi-BAFTA-winning Ricky and Stephen’s “exciting new project.”

  On top of that, I’d proudly broadcast news of the show to everybody I knew but if the pilot failed then I could see myself years down the line, bumping into people who’d ask: “What happened to that series you were doing with Ricky Gervais?” and I’d have to explain that I’d fallen short.

  I would be speaking Ricky and Stephen’s carefully crafted lines, and I needed to get the tone and nuances just right if I was going to do them justice. It was also daunting to act just six feet away from them, as they were directing behind the camera.