Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (22 page)

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Before I got my license, Daniel and I used to sit in the Mini in the garage, listening to music on the car stereo. We’d also put on our Ray-Bans, switch on the hazard lights, and pretend we were the Blues Brothers.

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The Mini finally had enough after 100,000 miles, after which it fell apart faster than a clown car.

Chapter Eleven

Willow’s Shotgun Wedding

Our dress requirements were a tad unusual but the tailor came up trumps.

 

With our bridesmaids and page boy, Luke.

 

The odd couple. Me and my beanpole best man and idiot, Daniel.

 

Us, mums, dads, and grandparents.

 

In the year following our engagement, Sam and I decided to buy a house and found a semidetached in Peterborough where Sam was still at college. Surrey, where my parents lived, was still ridiculously expensive as far as I was concerned, while Peterborough was fairly central, and not too distant from various studios and popular filming locations.

Then Sam uttered the two little words that send the pulses of men racing into panic mode: “I’m pregnant.”

It was a bit of a shock-horror moment. We were both so young, having just turned twenty, and although we planned to get married the following year we hadn’t intended to start a family quite so soon. The knowledge that a child was on the way meant that everything was suddenly turned on its head – including our outlook on life. We decided to continue with our wedding plans regardless, as the baby was due after our chosen date.

Sam had a beautiful pregnancy; she stayed active and retained the title of Chief Wedding Organizer. She had five bridesmaids and one page boy. What we’d originally planned as a small affair soon spiraled into a huge event for 120 people. Obviously, the wedding dress was a bit of a challenge for the dressmaker and I had to arrange for some extreme retailoring of a morning suit. But although it was a busy time we were very happy and excited; life couldn’t have been better.

And then, from nowhere, I suddenly fell into dire financial straits. Actors have very different accounts from normal self-employed people and I wasn’t at all up on what I should have known about tax. I had thought that my accountant had taken care of everything but he had somehow failed to notice that I should have registered for VAT (value added tax) almost ten years earlier. It was only when I moved to a new accountant that they noticed this – along with about ten years’ worth of other anomalies.

Suddenly, almost overnight, I was horrendously in debt.

At one point the bailiffs turned up at my parents’ house just as I’d packed all of my stuff into a van, ready to move to Peterborough. They must have thought that very convenient and they spent a lot of time eyeing up my precious Mini. Luckily, my new accountant managed to call them off.

Every penny I earned had to go toward paying back the tax. Luckily for me, Lucasfilm and the Jim Henson Organization accepted that I should have been paid VAT on my earnings and so they paid that part off for me.

It was awful; I really hadn’t done anything wrong, yet the taxman was breathing down my neck treating me like a criminal. I once answered the phone and a voice said, with no introduction: “We’ve been watching you, we know you’ve got a car and we will have that.”

“Fine,” I replied, “take it, it’s been bought on credit, so I don’t own it anyway.”

During all this, and while we were rapidly approaching the wedding, a tax inspector turned up at my door. His mouth dropped open when he saw me. He looked like a college professor. I noticed he still had his bicycle clips around his trousers.

“Oh dear,” he said in the tone of a natural, born bureaucrat, “they didn’t warn me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The office is supposed to tell me if people I’m going to visit are ‘different.’”

I didn’t much care for the tone in which he said “different,” almost with a sneer.

“Different? What do you mean, different?” I asked testily.

“Well, “black,” for example.”

“Black?”

“I didn’t know you were going to be short.”

“Why does it matter?”

He couldn’t give me an answer and mumbled incoherently. Even though I decided that he was a very unpleasant man, I felt obliged to let him in and he got to work in my office – a.k.a. the spare room with a desk and a chair. Whenever he saw Sam or me he shook his head worriedly.

On the third day he asked: “What are you?”

“Right! That’s it!”

I wrote to Customs and Excise and complained in no uncertain terms about this man and, more important, about this bigoted behavior. I received an official apology and, in what turned out to be a major victory, Customs and Excise changed their policy so that no personal information about color, size, or any other “difference” about any person would be kept on their files.

They didn’t let me off a penny of the tax I owed, though.

The one thing this horrible experience taught me was that I should always be proactive in my career. When you’ve got work, it’s very easy to sit back and forget to hunt out new jobs until the present one dries up. Ever since then I’m always thinking of the future, what I’m going to do next, and how to go about it and make it happen. No actor can afford to just sit back and wait for the phone to ring. Even major stars, particularly British ones, are not as wealthy as most people think. You have to knock on a lot of doors and keep on at people.
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It also made me appreciate what we have now, as back then we had to watch absolutely every penny.

I was desperately penniless. I had paid for the wedding and honeymoon before the tax debacle had begun and couldn’t get the money back. We sat in our newly bought house (which I was fighting to keep hold of) and watched a tiny portable black-and-white telly, which we had perched on top of a cardboard box while sitting on an old hand-me-down sofa, surviving off beans on toast.

It was odd being in such a desperate financial position at the same time as having such an extravagant celebration to prepare for. And to make things worse, I had significant worries about Daniel’s Best Man capabilities. Although he was my best friend, he was also an idiot. Daniel still didn’t have any idea what he wanted to do in life. I worried he might end up working at McDonald’s – I don’t mean to put McDonald’s down – and I’m still surprised Daniel passed his driving test.

He also still looked completely mental, like an anorexic member of Metallica. He was unkempt, skeletal, had long strawberry-blond hair, and was still totally obsessed with heavy metal, movies, and women. His parents were lovely, so I had no idea where it all came from. But I’ll say one thing for him; he showed me how to make the most of being the center of attention. By making people laugh, Daniel was able to get on the right side of both pupils and teachers and I was quick to pick up on this. Although looking different attracts attention, it’s your personality that really counts in the long run.

Incidentally, Daniel wasn’t the only one with long hair. I had also grown a fashionably long mullet of which I was extremely proud. In fact, it grew to be as long as Willow’s (that was a wig in the film). Then, just before the tax disaster, I had a curious urge, which gradually grew into an all-consuming desire, to have a wave put in. But for some reason, the local hairdresser interpreted the word “wave” as “tight perm” – perhaps because they seemed to be all the rage at this time. So I emerged from the hairdresser with a head full of ringlets and went straight to Debenhams where I bought a flat cap to cover them up. I spent a couple of days looking like a very short footballer before I found another hairdresser to iron the perm out.

Anyway, I digress. Daniel came over to our house the night before the wedding. Our house then was tiny – not me-tiny, just smaller than average – and Daniel came bounding in through the back door, full of excitement ahead of the big day. It had started to rain and Sam said we needed to get the washing in. Daniel, wanting to be helpful, yelled, “I’ll do it!”

He zipped around the garden, plucking the washing off the line before giving it to Sam in the kitchen. He then zipped around the dining room, kitchen, and lounge like Tigger the Tiger before pawing his way up the stairs looking for me, babbling on like a fool the whole time.

It was then that Sam noticed a peculiar aroma. During his little run round our back garden, Daniel had managed to tread in a dog poo the size of a cow pat. This mess was now spread throughout our entire house – on our brown carpet, which disguised the poo very effectively. This meant we couldn’t see where the poo was but, boy, could we smell it. So Sam and I spent the night before our wedding carpet cleaning. Our two dogs, Pepi and Wicket, watched from a distance, both of them looking as guilty as hell.

Yes, I was quite worried about Daniel’s Best Man capabilities.