Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (25 page)

I’m still not sure what he meant by that exactly but I let him start the fire and the house quickly turned into a baker’s oven.

“Is it me,” I said a few minutes later, “or is there a slight smoke haze in here?”

The smoke alarm went off.

“Aw jeez, that’s embarrassing,” Mark said.

“Why?” I asked.

“The alarm’s connected straight to the fire department.”

Minutes later the house was full of macho firemen stomping around demanding to know what was going on and where the fire was, and then why anyone would want to light an open fire on a balmy September evening in California.

It turned out Mark hadn’t realized that he was supposed to open something called “the chimney vent.” He was deeply embarrassed that our first meeting had turned out the way it had. So was I. But despite being a little char-grilled and a bit worried about Mark’s sanity, I signed up for the movie.

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 was 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.