Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (43 page)

In December I was suddenly struck down with a horrendous flu. I was also waiting to hear whether I’d got the part in the sixth
Harry Potter
film, so I was in a lousy mood. Mindful of this, I still kept one feverish eye on my iPhone.

I awoke from an agitated sleep and staggered, iPhone in hand, to the toilet. As I sat down I saw I had a voicemail from an unknown number.

Could that be the studio? I fumbled with the screen and pressed play.

“Hi, it’s Ricky Gervais here. With me is Stephen Merchant.”

I’d just been listening to one of their podcasts, so I assumed I’d accidentally pressed play on the iPod. Then I thought I was hallucinating.

“Warwick, we’ve read your thing, and we loved it. I loved the conceit, I thought it was tremendous. There were proper laugh-out-loud moments. What are you doing with it? Give me a call. Anything you want to add, Stephen?”

“Yes, thanks Ricky, we thought it was great, loved it. We were only sorry it was so short . . . Oops, no offense.”

Both of them started giggling.

I couldn’t believe it. Here were comedy heroes of mine telling me I’d made them laugh.

Suddenly, thanks to Ricky, a project that had been not much more than a pipe dream was at the top of everyone’s to-do list. I couldn’t help but grin – one of the greatest accolades of my career had come while I was sitting on the toilet.

“I always felt we’d underused you in
Extras
,” Ricky told me when I called him back. “Look,” he continued, “I want to executive produce this, okay?”

A couple of weeks later I was standing at reception in BBC Television Center with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant (we really stood out from the crowd), waiting to see Mark Freeland, Head of Comedy. I had another one of those out of body experiences. I looked down on myself and asked, “How on earth did this happen”?

We were shown into Mark’s office. I’d brought a DVD of a few short clips to illustrate the concept. All four of us use Apple Macs and we all had the usual chat about how marvelous these machines are as I pulled my MacBook Pro out of my bag. The DVD refused to play. I ejected it and reinserted it several times, all the while apologizing, bright red and sweating profusely.

Of course, just at that moment, the DVD refused to play. I ejected it and reinserted it a couple of times. Nothing. I restarted the thing, all the while apologizing, bright red and sweating profusely.

Why me? Why at this moment in my life? I felt as if I were making them all look like idiots for singing the praises of Apple and now here I was, demonstrating the exact opposite. Finally, just as I was about to surrender once and for all, it started playing.

I’d been so traumatized by the whole event that I hardly noticed that the three of them had started laughing.

Surely, I thought, they’re just being nice? Laughing out of politeness. Surely it’s not that funny?

Then Ricky turned to Mark and said, “This is BAFTA-winning stuff.”

Holy cow.

We left the office with a development commission, which meant we could develop the script into a full episode and do some casting. My head spun. I hardly knew what to say or what to do next. Suddenly I was on the verge of having my very own TV series.

After the meeting, Ricky and Stephen immediately began to refine the idea. The show (called
Life’s Too Short
) stars me playing a different version of myself – who has just divorced his average-sized wife. Essentially, it’s about me struggling to rebuild my life and career as well as dealing with the day-to-day issues that being short throws up.

To say this was a subject close to my heart would be a massive understatement. This, to me, was really powerful comedy, the best kind there is. Besides, it wasn’t as if we were short on material.

When the time came to shoot the pilot I’d learned the half-hour script so well I could recite it back to front, upside down, and in Ewokese. There was no way I was going to risk fluffing my lines in front of Ricky and the entire crew. Besides, I needed to focus on my performance, and this is a lot easier when you know your lines backward.

I was quietly confident that it would go well, but a dark and troubling thought lurked in the back of my mind: a great deal was resting on my small shoulders. Ricky, Stephen, and the BBC had put all their faith in me. If I somehow managed to mess up then there was every possibility they would recast or shelve the whole series.

Also, by the time we came to shoot the pilot, word had spread and the media world had turned their attention on multi-BAFTA-winning Ricky and Stephen’s “exciting new project.”

On top of that, I’d proudly broadcast news of the show to everybody I knew but if the pilot failed then I could see myself years down the line, bumping into people who’d ask: “What happened to that series you were doing with Ricky Gervais?” and I’d have to explain that I’d fallen short.

I would be speaking Ricky and Stephen’s carefully crafted lines, and I needed to get the tone and nuances just right if I was going to do them justice. It was also daunting to act just six feet away from them, as they were directing behind the camera.

Ricky loves slapstick and worked quite a bit into the pilot. In one scene, I’m supposed to scale a bookshelf, much like I used to scale the supermarket shelves, and well—my mountaineering skills aren’t that effective, shall we say.

I was halfway up the shelf and struggling when a banshee screech erupted behind me, followed by a scream of: “I’m going to burst, I’m going to burst!” It was Ricky’s, er, “distinctive laugh,” something I soon got to know very well. It starts with two short high-pitched coughing sonic waves immediately followed by an extended screech that quickly reaches a frequency that makes dogs pass out and causes bats to fly into one another.

Ricky ruined a
lot
of takes that way, but every time I heard those two initial sonic pulses, it was Mahler to my ears; it inspired me to push that little bit extra
^b
to get him laughing again. Inevitably he’d set everyone else off, as well. It made for a joyful shoot; we all wished we were shooting the entire series right there and then.

I knew things were going really well when Ricky wrote the following statement on his blog: “Had one of the best day’s filming on anything ever.” He also overinflated my ego somewhat when he wrote: “Warwick Davis is officially one of the funniest people in the world.” Now that’s a quote that will go on my gravestone (or the front of this book).

Throughout, Ricky and Stephen made good use of my natural ability to fall over almost anything. Once they were happy that I’d said everything they’d written in the way they wanted, they started playing around and let me try a few ideas of my own – which I feel was important, considering I was playing a warped version of myself.

Ricky and Stephen pretty much hired the
Extras
production crew and as we’d done in
Extras
, we worked short days, from about 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.—at the latest. It was wonderful. And it was a real delight to be free of masks, giant heads, and sweltering costumes and to be the lead with so much dialogue. One day, while filming on an unused airfield, we came across a basketball court. At lunchtime, I teamed up with Peter (another little actor who makes an appearance in
Life’s Too Short
) and had a two-on-two basketball match against Ricky and Stephen (who is 6-foot -7). They won, but only just.

In one scene, where my character visits Ricky and Stephen at their office, we ended up improvising for about twenty minutes straight, and again I had that weird feeling of “How did I get here?” “Is this real?” “Am I about to wake up on the set of
Prince Valiant II
?” To have that much fun while working
and
getting paid for it, well, it doesn’t get any better.

Actually it did. While we were working on the pilot, Ricky arrived on the set with
Sesame Street
sensation Elmo (along with Kevin Clash, his “owner”). We filmed a little skit
^c
where Ricky describes me as his “weird friend” and sits me on one knee and Elmo on the other.

Even more important, however, I got to meet the legend that is Karl Pilkington.

Ricky first encountered Karl when he was the producer of Ricky’s XFM radio show in London back in 2002. Karl is . . . well, how does one begin to describe Karl? Ricky calls him “an idiot with a head like an effing orange.”

Karl, a Mancunian and a frustrated dancer, has a truly unique take on the world, brought about in part by his unusual upbringing, in which his mum shaved his cat (just the front half, mind you) and kept a litter tray in the cupboard under the stairs for Karl’s use (not the cat’s). One of his friends kept a horse indoors, and Karl’s dad once put a misbehaving child in a bin.

For those of you who have yet to experience the joy of Pilkington, I suggest you look up the
Ricky Gervais Show
podcasts (in 2006, these were awarded the Guinness World Record for most downloaded podcast).

Since then Ricky adopted Karl (or made him his pet, I’m not sure which is more appropriate) and has badgered him into writing books, appearing on TV shows (the radio shows were turned into animations and were broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK and HBO in the United States) and movies, and recently sent him around the world in a TV series called
An Idiot Abroad.
^d

I’d asked Ricky and Stephen to introduce me to Karl when I first met them on the set of
Extras.
Karl had since mentioned me in one of his podcasts, as he has a childlike fascination for all things unusual. He’d said: “The first time I see him, I’d be a little like, ‘What should I say, what shouldn’t I say?’ Whereas once you get to know him I’m sure he’d be a lovely little fella.”

Ricky asked me to appear with Karl as part of a filmed and unscripted bonus feature for his stand-up DVD,
Science.
Ricky didn’t want me to speak to Karl before we met but this was quickly sabotaged when the unmistakable orange-shaped head peered around the door while I was waiting in a side room.

“Awight,” Karl said, blinking, his mouth hanging open (his trademark expression).

“Hi,” I replied. “I’m not supposed to talk to you yet. Ricky wants it to all be fresh for when we’re on camera.”

“Oh no, what’s he planning now?”

It turned out Ricky hadn’t told Karl what we were up to. We sat together in silence while we waited for Ricky, which was very surreal but that was nothing compared to the interview. Ricky set it up so that I had to practically sit in Karl’s lap, which made the orange-headed one very uncomfortable.

At one point I showed Karl the first edition of this book. He turned straight to the picture section and, on seeing the stills from
Return of the Ewok
, he exclaimed: “Who put you in goal!?” He’d assumed I was a keen footballer as a child and that these shots were from my time on the school football team.

At the end of the video, I asked if I could squeeze Karl’s head, which is something Ricky likes to do because of its unusual roundness. Ricky got very excited and started screaming with laughter, almost falling out of his chair as I reached up and clamped my hands on Karl’s head, giving it a good squeeze. Karl doesn’t like this at all (understandable really, I suppose) and leapt up, sending me tumbling to the floor while exclaiming in his strong Mancunian accent: “This is like something out of
Twin Peaks
!”
^e