Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (4 page)

Mr. Miller, the Latin teacher, was known as “Windy Miller” for reasons too obvious to go into here and was ironically cursed with an enormous nose, while Mr. Scully (a.k.a. “Yellowbeard”) liked to nip out every five minutes for a cigarette. He’d hide behind the school wall but we could tell when he was on his way back to the classroom because the cloud of smoke that always accompanied him started to move. Then there was the teacher, whose name escapes me, who would whirl around and throw a piece of chalk at anyone who was mucking about while his back was turned. We thought he had psychic abilities but in reality he could see us all in the reflection of his glasses as he wrote on the board (he let us in on his secret on our last day).

Sports day proved to be difficult. I sway a bit when I walk and so the egg-and-spoon race turned into a pick-up-the-egg-and-spoon race and when the teacher shouted “
Go!
” at the start of the sack race, I pulled up the sack and disappeared inside. As for the obstacle course (essentially a couple of upside-down benches and a few hoops), well, I might as well have been trying to get into the Special Air Service.

Unusually, I loved school dinners. They did a great mashed potato, a wonderful meat pie, and fantastic rice pudding with jam. The only thing I couldn’t handle was cabbage. The problem was, we were supposed to eat everything on our plates before we could leave. To get around this, I’d pop the cabbage in my pocket and then spend a few minutes out in the playground surreptitiously scattering cabbage pieces in the style of
The Great Escape
tunnelers getting rid of the soil they’d dug out.

The only incident of bullying I ever suffered was pretty mild, as it goes. As my classmates began to overtake me heightwise, there came a time where two of my best friends, Paul and Richard, started to use my height for their own amusement. They managed to lock me in a classroom simply by closing the door behind them, knowing that I wasn’t able to reach the handle to open it.

I returned home in a miserable mood. Dad asked me what was wrong and I explained. He just nodded and didn’t say too much at the time. Behind the scenes, however, he came up with a cunning plan.

As they were my “best friends,” Dad had Paul and Richard’s phone numbers and so he called their homes and asked to speak to them personally.

“Warwick’s been telling me that he’s been having a bit of trouble at school and that two of the kids locked him in the classroom today,” he told them. “He doesn’t want to tell me who did this, however. As you’re his best friend I’m asking you to keep an eye out for him and to let me know the next time this happens, so I know exactly who’s behind it.”

I never had another day’s trouble from Richard or Paul and normal relations were resumed.

My routine at the end of each school day was to get changed out of my uniform, hang it up (I was also an obsessive-compulsive child), make a cup of tea, and then switch on the TV to catch my favorite shows.

I never missed an episode of
Scooby-Doo
, broadcast once a week at 4:30 p.m. Back then, if you missed it, you missed it. There were no video recorders (except for some extremely expensive top-loaders with huge buttons and dials), no Sky Plus, just three channels to choose from and that was it.

Then there was
Take Hart
with Tony Hart. (My mum’s claim to fame was that she once acted in a famous road safety ad for Brittax with Tony. She put on her seatbelt while Tony did the talking.) Another favorite was
Rentaghost
, a long-running children’s TV series about a bunch of ghosts trying to set up their own business. This would later become a major source of inspiration for my own filmmaking.

Once the news came on at 5:40 p.m., I switched over to BBC2 for the
Laurel and Hardy
reruns. These were a huge influence on my own physical comedy. They are simply timeless and now my own kids have gotten into them; their favorite episode is “Brats,” made in 1930, where Stan and Oliver look after themselves as kids. This relied upon some quite sophisticated special-effects work and an awful amount of physical pain, something I would come to experience myself, also in the name of comedy.

When he was home Dad’s word was final on what we watched and that meant sports or
Last of the Summer Wine
. He enjoyed wrestling, which was broadcast live on ITV on Saturday afternoons. It was beamed from some dodgy town hall from locations across the UK I’d never heard of before. It was nothing like the slick American shows you see today. The blokes were as fat as sumo wrestlers and were covered in hair, prison tattoos, and Brylcreem. The air was blue with cigarette smoke exhaled by a working-class audience.

The fact that these hugely fat men would beat each other up straight after Saturday kids’ TV never seemed to trouble anyone. I can remember the big bout of the time would be between Big Daddy (good guy) with a record-breaking 64-inch chest and the amazing 672-pound Giant Haystacks (bad guy) – he looked like a man who had been bottle-fed scrumpy since birth. As far as I could tell, it pretty much came down to two blokes charging at each other using their bellies as battering rams.

Dad also enjoyed snooker and the Derby, but what took precedence over all else was Wimbledon. Then, this being such a special occasion, the television would be connected to an extension cord, taken outside, and we would watch it in the garden. Dad also did this for the Grand Prix, which was the only time the TV was allowed on during lunch or dinner, when it would be turned around to face the table so my dad could see it while he ate.

As blindingly obvious as it may seem my first film memory really was of
Star Wars
, which came out when I was seven years old. The excitement it caused reached insane levels. The local cinema was literally surrounded by a line.

Just as my friend and I finally completed the circuit and stepped up to the ticket booth, as if on cue they did that classic thing of flipping the sign around in our faces – cinema full. Then a man emerged and, with an air of great importance, strung the magical velvet rope between two short steel poles, thereby preventing entry into the building. Being British, we would never dare to challenge the authority of the velvet rope, but we weren’t afraid of a line, either, and so we stayed put until the next showing. We were the first in and therefore able to choose the best seats.

We left the cinema in a daze and, after I got home, I spoke to my mum at about a hundred miles an hour trying to explain the plot as she applied her makeup, ready to go out. From that day on, my friends and I talked about
Star Wars
constantly.

It should therefore have been at the forefront of my mind when my mum repeated her question. “Come on, Warwick,” Mum said earnestly, “what do you love more than anything else?” There was nothing I liked more than the idea of driving a go-kart, so I shrugged my shoulders. Mum sighed, then smiled brightly. “How would you like to be in
Star Wars
?”

^a
Ewokese for “A Long Time Ago in a Village Far, Far Away,” although the literal translation is: “A While Ago in a Tree Hut Across the Valley.”

^b
Brace yourselves: this book is pun-heavy, most of them unintentional.

^c
As it turned out, the doctors were wrong yet again and it would be many years before I would discover that I had a far more unusual and complex one-in-a-million condition (lucky me).

^d
No, I wasn’t in
Lord of the Rings
, I’m too short for a Hobbit.

^e
An irrational fear of little people. Lollypopguildophobia would also send people with hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (fear of long words) into convulsions.

Chapter Two

An Ewok Is Born

Nana Davis (who got me my big break), me, and Mum on the day of the
Return of the Jedi
cast screening. Behind us Dad is holding up my Darth Vader action figure carrying case, given to me by Mark Hamill.

 

On my way to Elstree to film
Return of the Jedi
.

 

My sister and I making friends with Mark Hamill (aka Luke Skywalker).

 

Another toy for the
Star Wars
collection – except this one was based on me!

 

The dads with two Ewok sons, me and Nicky Read.

 

Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

David Tomblin directs me in
Return of the Ewok
as Nicky Read looks on.

 

Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

A “heads-off” moment. Note the costumes hanging behind me. After a few weeks of filming they had a unique aroma.

 

It was all thanks to my Nan.

Nan could easily have been the inspiration for Professor Minerva McGonagall. My parents were very social; they were always going to Saturday evening dinner parties or some kind of dinner and dance, which meant that my sister and I were placed in the loving care of Nana Davis.

She lived in a huge and ancient magical mansion in the small Surrey town of Banstead. The windows were latticed with lead, and beams hundreds of years old crossed the ceilings. The fireplace roared while the wind howled down the chimney and we’d sit in what was probably the coziest lounge in England, eating Nan’s salad sandwiches (once you added lots of salad dressing they were fine) and watching TV game shows all night long:
Play Your Cards Right
,
Game for a Laugh
,
Family Fortunes
, the
Generation Game,
and so on. Every now and again we played board games or cards.

Nan was totally obsessed with the weather and she passed this obsession on to me. There always seemed to be something weird happening at her house. No sooner were we through the door than she’d be telling me in a suitably atmospheric voice as she waggled her fingers descriptively, “Just had some ball lightning here the other day, I was on the stairs just here and right outside the lead window there was a huge, dancing ball of light.”

For some reason there were always really, really bad storms at Nan’s house, it was as if she were Thora, the Goddess of Thunder and Lightning.

To make things even more interesting, her house was also full of ghosts and ghouls. Not the
Rentaghost
kind but proper horrors – the beheaded, drowned, and buried alive sort.

“I saw the Green Lady the other day,” she’d say, tucking my sister and me up in bed, “she walks the secret passage between here and the church,
^a
she’s been ringing those bells again.”

These were the old servants’ bells; the masters of the house could call them from any room in the house, so if you rang the lounge bell, the bell under the sign marked “lounge” would ring in the servants’ quarters.

Guess where we slept? I looked up at the bells in horror and trembled as Nan continued.

“She moaned at me something horrible the other night, she did. She’s not at rest, you know. Gives me the chills.”

Then with a cheery “Goodnight,” spoken as if she’d just been talking about the price of cheese with the milkman, Nan switched off the light and shut the door with a solid “clunk.” I lay there staring at the bells, waiting for one of them to ring.

Any midnight trip to the bathroom was fraught with terror. I’d wait until the last possible moment before sprinting down the huge hallway, which seemed to me to be about the length and height of Westminster Cathedral, in what was a dramatic race against time.