Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (33 page)

The first thing I knew about all this was 9 a.m. on Monday morning when a hysterical mother superior called me. “We have let the girls decide their end-of-year entertainment for over fifty years!” she shrieked, forcing me to hold the phone away from my ear. “After this ungodly act we can never let them choose again! You’ve ruined it for everybody!”

I was tempted to say, “At least you’ll have the memories,” followed by “To whom should we send the invoice?” Instead, I apologized and quickly hung up, my ears ringing.

Paul was a genius but a real force to be reckoned with. During rehearsals at one nightclub, Paul yelled at Gee the fireeater
^c
so much he became flustered and knocked over his fuel, which burst into flames, causing his lighter to explode and shoot a column of fire up to the ceiling. There we were, half a dozen little people and one very camp hysterical man running around a column of fire, everyone shouting at once. It looked like some bizarre pagan ritual where a witch doctor had shrunk the Village People.

I sprinted out to the lobby where a receptionist seated behind a high counter was filing her nails.

“We need a fire extinguisher!” I yelled.

She peered over the top of her desk and watched as I flapped around in a panic below her.

“Oh,” she said in a thick Essex accent, “I’m not sure we’ve got one.” She placed a finger to her lips and pondered. The shouts from the rehearsal room were getting louder.

“It’s quite urgent,” I said, trying to restrain my rising panic.

“No, wait a minute, yes we do.”

She disappeared into a back office and came back a few seconds later.

“What sort of fire is it? Only we’ve got different extinguishers for different fires.”

“I don’t care! Just give me one that squirts something!”

Eventually, a few very long seconds later, she returned with a fire extinguisher.

“There you go,” and she dropped it into my arms.

Now, bearing in mind I’m not much taller or heavier than a standard fire extinguisher, the damn thing nearly flattened me. I half-carried, half-dragged it back into the maelstrom, where we quickly got the flames under control.

“I think that concludes rehearsals,” I said as the foam and smoke settled around us. We quickly marched out under a cloud (literally). The nightclub owners never said a thing.

I once took a booking for a show and wouldn’t tell the lads what it was, just that it was somewhere in central London, giving them the address at the last minute. It was only when the music started and they ran onto the stage that they were confronted by a roomful of screaming men in leather and piercings.

“The little git’s booked us into a gay club!”

Still, they pulled it off, so to speak, and escaped intact. They planned to kill me as soon as the show was over but I managed to lie low until they’d calmed down.

Finally, after two incredible years, the guys were exhausted, the Velcro had lost its grip, and we decided it was time they hung up their G-strings, while they were still at the height of their popularity.

Just as they did so, it was also time for me to dig out my shiny-buckled shoes, re-don my little green hat, and speak the immortal line: “Flee while you can, the future’s not good – for no one is safe from a Lep in the ’hood!”

With Peter Burroughs, father-in-law and co-founder of Willow Personal Management as well as
The Half Monty
.

 

^a
Oh yes it is!

^b
What Dave Vear lacked in height he did his best to make up for in girth.

^c
He danced to “Hot! Hot! Hot!”

Chapter Seventeen

Guess Who’s Back?

Guess who’s back? This time for
Lep in the Hood
and
Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood
, parts five and six of the unbelievably (in the truest sense of the word) successful franchise.

 

They were always finding new ways to kill the Leprechaun. On this occasion I was dumped in “cement” (actually porridge).

 

Lunch break: Eating Chinese food on the streets of South Central L.A. while gunfire echoed through the night. Life didn’t get any more surreal than that.

 

Once again,
Leprechaun in Space
had been a great financial success, if not a critical one: “The best movie I’ve seen about a leprechaun in space in years,” and “Do you really need to know any more than the title?”

The producers were determined to make another one but needed to come up with a novel situation in which to put the Leprechaun. They took their job very seriously and formed a focus group to find out who watches the
Leprechaun
films. After much research they concluded that the audience was mainly made up of black Americans.

Needless to say, for
Leprechaun in the Hood: Lep in the ’hood, come to do no good!
I was the only green actor on the set. Every which way I turned there was a rapper. And I had a new set of rules. The iron phobia was gone and now, to my surprise, they expected me to be able to rap.

I kept asking them for the lyrics but the writers just said, “Don’t worry, we’ll just write them on the day.” I went to my fellow cast members for advice on how to rap. These included Coolio and Ice-T (his real name’s Tracy, I kid you not), among many other rap luminaries. They all thought it was very cool to be in a
Leprechaun
film and they seemed to be having a blast. They were very kind and did their best to teach me how to rap. They even showed me some dance moves and taught me how to fold my arms like a proper gangsta but you just can’t become a gangsta rapper overnight, especially when your ’hood, back in the day, was leafy Surrey.

When we eventually did the song I was pretty pleased with it and I thought it might go out as a single. I could see myself performing it on MTV and even today I get requests for the “Leprechaun Rap” at conventions. I always pretend I’ve forgotten the lyrics but I must confess that I recall every single word.

Not long after we’d started shooting, Ice-T burst into my trailer in a panic and started uprooting sofa cushions. “I think, I hope, I left something here,” he said. Ice-T was a cardboardcutout version of a rapper; he was always “in character” and rolled up on the set in a massive Merc playing his own music full blast. Eventually, with a sigh of relief, he lifted up the thickest gold chain I’d ever seen. How could you lose something like that? I mean, a ring, fair enough, but a gold chain that weighed more than my daughter?

We filmed the interior scenes for
Lep in the Hood
at Lacy Street Studios – where
Cagney and Lacey
had been filmed. All of the sets were identical, none of them had been changed since the TV series.

Things got a lot more interesting, however, when we moved out into the street. We filmed mainly at night in L.A.’s notorious gangsta ’hood, South Central, which presented a whole different kind of horror.

“Ready, Warwick?”

I nodded uncertainly. I was in full Leprechaun costume halfway up a tree in South Central, L.A. How ready could I be?

I was supposed to leap onto a young female victim who was walking along the street below and would then be rescued by her boyfriend who happened to pass by on his motorbike while carrying a baseball bat.

“And action!”

Just as I prepared to launch myself, a couple of not-too-distant gunshots from a .357 Magnum
^a
echoed through the night.

Suddenly distracted, I lost my footing, missed my cue, and landed facedown on the pavement below.

“Are you okay, Warwick?”

“Grrrrnfh,” I said, slowly raising my clawed hand to give the thumbs-up.

In order to film there safely we had to pay our respects to the gang that ran the neighborhood – very smartly dressed young gentlemen who all rode sports bikes. They’d roll up, engines at full revs, and bring everything to a halt, ignoring the fact that this was a “closed set,” and check out anything they wanted, whenever they wanted. Nobody dared stop them.

At first, because I was dressed in green, I worried that I might be wearing the wrong color. So much of gangland was defined by the colors the people wore, red and blue for the Bloods and Crips respectively, for example. I was very relieved when one of the crew told me that the gangs saw green as a neutral color.

Amazingly, they seemed to be scared of me; I was always in full costume and I think they actually believed that this was how I looked all the time. Even most of the crew didn’t really want to eat with me – except for Gabe, the makeup artist. I suppose only Dr. Frankenstein could have lunch with his monster. There’s a very surreal photo of me sitting on a wooden crate, alone, in costume in the middle of the road right in the heart of gangland, eating Chinese food out of a carton.

My fellow rappers, however, were familiar with the films and were thrilled to see my character. And thanks to their involvement there was quite a bit of interest in the film from MTV. I appeared on a few chat shows in New York, including Greg Kinnear, but the best thing I did was a skit for MTV in full costume on their
Beauty and the Beach
show in San Diego.

Gabe and I had a good laugh about this when we rolled into San Diego. “Who’d have thought it?” Gabe said, “I can’t believe we’re five films down the road and about to go on mainstream TV!”

For the San Diego job, Gabe came and made me up as the Leprechaun in a hotel room. This meant a half-mile walk from the hotel to the event – in full costume. I got into the elevator and a Hispanic cleaner ran out screaming down the hall. Feeling a bit playful, I decided to chase her and when she ran back into the elevator I jumped in behind her just as the doors were closing and laughed like a maniac. She screamed until I thought my eardrums would burst. I dropped the act and tried to reassure her on the way down that I was wearing makeup, that I wasn’t “real,” it didn’t help; I left the poor woman in a very confused and dazed state, mumbling incoherently in the corner of the elevator.

I then strolled down to the beach where hundreds of beautiful college girls and handsome college boys were waiting for me to judge a beauty contest. I kid you not. I was on the panel with one of the guys from
Baywatch
and he didn’t know if I was real or not. I decided the best way to play this was to take the judging completely seriously. I tried to do it in the style of Simon Cowell crossed with the Leprechaun and was suitably disparaging to all of the contestants.

Lep in the Hood
was a smash hit. “Actually physically painful to watch,” wrote one reviewer. “If you need a reason to hate yourself, a reason to want to do yourself bodily harm, or a reason to go completely insane with no hope of recovery, watch
Leprechaun in the Hood
,” and “I must say, I didn’t think that
Leprechaun 4
could be followed. Man, was I wrong.”

As it turned out I was nominated for a Video Premiere Award
^b
in the Best Actor category in 2001, which was great because I became part of the VPA Academy and received free DVDs of all nominated movies for life.

It was a tough year; I was up against Jean-Claude Van Damme (
Replicant
), Fred Ward (
Full Disclosure
), and Christopher Lloyd (
When Good Ghouls Go Bad
). We all lost out to Courtney B. Vance, who played the lead in
Love and Action in Chicago
, the tagline of which was: “A hit man rethinks his celibacy.” Like I said, it was a tough year.

Number six,
Back 2 tha Hood
, followed soon after. In that film I smoked a bong that was as big as me. It was filled with herbal tobacco and it made me half-laugh and half-choke, which helped me produce the most evil cackle I’ve ever done. There are a couple of Laurel and Hardy slapstick moments where after getting stoned I fall over flat on my back – it felt fine at the time but I was in agony the next day.

At one point I get the munchies and attack the fridge but I’m supposed to get stuck inside when somebody knocks the fridge door shut with their butt.

“Couldn’t you have bought a bigger fridge”? I asked, not unreasonably, I thought. “It’s tiny.”

“But you’re tiny,” the props guy said, trying to force me inside. “Come on, get your other arm in.”

“I can’t,” I protested, shoving a carton of milk and some salami to one side, “I’m going to come out box-shaped!”