Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (10 page)

^c
No, I wasn’t.

^d
I know, I know.

^e
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

^f
Their names escape me. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

Chapter Five

Return of the Ewok

I made a special guest appearance at George Lucas’s four-year-old daughter’s birthday party. The kids got a tad overexcited and almost fed me to death.

 

A thank-you note to Wicket from Amanda Lucas.

 

Wake up, Warwick!”

It was my sister. What the hell was she doing in my bedroom and waking me up? “Go away!”

“Someone’s throwing stones at the house!”

“What?” I sat up. Sure enough, I could hear what sounded to me like gravel being thrown at the window. Except the sound wasn’t quite right. It sounded more like popping. I ran to the window and looked out. Smoke was everywhere.

“The house is on fire!”

At that moment Mum and Dad burst into the room.

“Stay calm,” Dad said. “It’s in the garage, not in the house, but we have to get out now.”

We quickly played the game of “If your house was burning down what would you grab?” I tried to gather all the important stuff that shouldn’t go up in smoke. But by the time I got outside I realized with no little horror that I’d forgotten Jabba the Gerbil.

On his way out, Dad ran his palm over the living room wall that adjoined the garage. “Ow!” He whipped his hand away, shaking it. If the door from the utility room to the garage had been open we would have lost the house.

All thoughts of the gerbil were quickly put to one side as I realized that my most prized possession was in that garage. “My motorbike!”

While my sister was into horses, I was into horsepower and was now the very proud owner of a Yamaha PeeWee 50 motorbike, which – as the name implies – was tiny. I used to fly around the field that adjoined our house impersonating Evel Knievel and would spend hours collecting and arranging cardboard boxes to crash through.

I used to love
Kick Start
, the TV motorbike talent show. Contestants riding trials bikes would attempt to complete an obstacle course against the clock. My favorite part was when they rode over a VW Beetle and I tried to replicate that and as many of the other stunts they did as possible, such as riding in and out of ditches, bunny hops, and pulling wheelies.

The fire brigade rolled up just in time to save the house and extinguished the fire without too much difficulty. It turned out that Dad had left the car battery charger on and it was this that had caught fire.

One of the firemen took us around to inspect the damage. He explained how lucky we were that the main house hadn’t caught fire. There was a slight buckle in the ceiling. The fireman pointed to it and said, “That steel girder must have been heated to over three thousand degrees, it’s expanded into the adjoining wall and is now poking into your utility room.”

By then I was looking down at my bike in horror. All the plastic parts had melted into a smoking puddle on the garage floor, leaving a tiny metal skeleton behind.

Dad shared my look of horror but for different reasons. The fire had reached the paint cupboard, which was full of pots that Dad had collected over a lifetime of DIY; every color imaginable had lined those shelves. But they had exploded in the heat and had turned his car (a vintage Sunbeam) into Joseph’s Technicolor Dream Car.

Miraculously, both vehicles worked fine when we turned their respective ignitions a few days later. They really knew how to build things to last in those days. Luckily, it was possible to order replacement parts for my motorbike and, although Dad looked like a wild rainbow hippie for a few weeks, he eventually had the car resprayed.

One day, while I was re-creating
Kick Start
on my newly stuck-together bike, Mum, obviously terribly excited about something, called me inside.

“Lucasfilm want you to play Wicket again!”

My face lit up. “No way!”

I know some
Star Wars
fans don’t like them, but the public response to the Ewoks was overwhelmingly positive, so George Lucas had decided to produce a TV special with me reprising the role of Wicket. It would mean eight weeks in San Francisco filming near the Skywalker Ranch.

This was my first lead role but I took it in my stride. I knew the character inside out by then and I was bursting with enthusiasm. In the film Wicket had learned English and was able to communicate with the human stars, a pair of space kids. I was delighted to see that Ewok-suit technology had improved somewhat – the mouth could actually move this time, although it was a little stiff, a bit like the
Monty Python
mouths in the Terry Gilliam animations.

Another new development was that I could now move the Ewok eyes using a wrist mechanism, which was weird at first but I soon got so used to it that I started to move my wrists in anticipation of where I was going to look – even when I was out of costume.

The main problem hadn’t yet been dealt with, however; the eyes would still mist up within seconds. So, once again, I had to memorize the set layout and use the glare of the studio lights to judge whether I should turn left, right, or keep going straight ahead. The suit was a lot heavier as well and I fell over a great many times. Luckily it was so thick I never hurt myself, but it was also much harder to stop myself rolling down a hill once I’d started.

To my dismay surfer dude Ray had been replaced by the Snow Queen–esque Mrs. Ramsay. She was a woman’s woman and was pretty scary. She held an unshakable faith in education over every other one of life’s pursuits and was an obsessively strict timekeeper who held no fear of film directors. She once marched onto the set while the cameras were rolling and commanded: “Warwick Davis, put down that spear immediately, modern political history awaits you!”

“Please, just one more take!”

“Absolutely not,” she’d say, tapping her watch with barely contained fury. “Lessons should have started ten minutes ago.”

The one exception that did halt Mrs. Ramsay in her tracks was the sudden appearance of the King of Pop. Apparently Michael Jackson was a big fan of the Ewoks and had dropped by to see us in the fur, so to speak. This was 1984, two years after
Thriller
and his legendary world tour. Jackson was at the absolute height of his godlike fame.

“Hi,” he said. “Can I have my picture taken with you?”

My reply probably sounded like Ewokese but I gave the distinct impression that this would be more than OK. He put his arm round me, leaned in, and “snap,” the moment was over.

“Well, it was lovely meeting you, I gotta run, I’m going to the White House now, I’m late for my meeting with President Reagan.”

And he was gone.

It was then that I realized I’d forgotten to remove my head.

“Oh no! No one will ever know it was me!”

Tony Cox and Debbie Carrington played my Ewok brother and sister. They’d both been Ewoks in
Jedi
and have since gone on to have incredibly successful acting careers of their own. Tony was actually a stunt Ewok in
Jedi
, and acted as a double for Kenny in the scene where Paploo was struggling to keep a grip on the speeder bike he’d just stolen. To get the shot the crew positioned the bike so it was vertical and filmed Tony dangling from the handlebars with the camera tilted to match the on-screen perspective. Tony was also the fabulously brilliant little limo driver in
Me, Myself and Irene
and has been in dozens of Hollywood films, while Debbie has appeared in
Bones
,
Dexter
,
Nip/Tuck
,
Boston Legal
,
ER,
and many more famous TV dramas.

We stayed in a Holiday Inn in Marin County, very near the Golden Gate Bridge. I leapt out of bed every morning and greeted the day with a twenty-step sprint and dive into the swimming pool, which was just outside our door.

When the film, called
Caravan of Courage
, aired it broke U.S. TV records. It was so successful that George decided to show it in cinemas in Europe. I was invited to the special media screening in Leicester Square, so I took my Nan. She loved it and appreciated the fact that I hadn’t forgotten who started it all.