Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (26 page)

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.

I enjoyed the fast pace, as it gave my character energy and kept us all on our toes, but some of the crew found it hard to keep up. We seemed to burn through cameramen at an extraordinary rate. Every time I looked up another new face was staring at me through the eyepiece.

Rodman also came up with his own bizarre set of Leprechaun rules. He decided the Leprechaun couldn’t touch anything made of wrought iron and so the entire movie revolved around me touching or being imprisoned by iron (the Leprechaun has to trick his way out of an iron safe at one point).

According to mystic legend (a.k.a. Rodman), the Leprechaun can have the hand of any damsel who sneezes three times, explained in the immortal line: “She sneezes once, she sneezes twice, she’ll be me bride when she sneezes thrice!”

One can only presume there weren’t many allergies hundreds of years ago. After the heroine, in this case Bridget (played by a beautiful blond Shevonne Durkin), has sneezed the requisite three times, I tie her up in preparation for marriage.

In one very gross scene, I had to lick poor Shevonne’s face. Gabe, the crazy makeup guy, told me he had something very special in mind for this scene. He revealed he’d made a three-inch tongue extension that he wanted me to try. What’s more, the tongue had a fork, much like a snake’s.