Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (8 page)

I would be the first Ewok the audience would see and so, as the ambassador for my race, so to speak, I wanted to make a good impression. I would certainly set the Ewok tone for the rest of the film. I had no time to prepare but I’d been playing an Ewok for weeks, so I just did what I thought an Ewok would do naturally with Princess Leia. When she appeared on set, Carrie immediately showed her concern for me.

“Are you okay in there, Warwick?” she said. “It must be so hot.” She reached down behind a log and pulled out a carton of chocolate milk with a long straw and fed me cookies in between takes.

She was everything an eleven-year-old Ewok could possibly wish for. By this time Carrie was already battling drink and drug addiction. But if there was a bottle of vodka with a straw hidden behind another branch, I didn’t see it. She was so caring toward me. Whenever there was a pause, she asked if I needed anything. “Could I have another one of those cookies?” became my standard reply.

From that day forth I became Wicket and was pushed to the front of the Ewok tribe.

I kept improvising like mad.

There was another scene where, purring like a cat, I hug Han Solo’s leg while C-3PO tells us stories around the campfire. The look of surprise and then resignation on Harrison’s face wasn’t acted.

As for Jedi Skywalker, he was elevated to supreme emperor best-friend status when he asked, “Say, Warwick, do you collect
Star Wars
toys?”

“Of course!” I replied, “I love them.”

In those innocent days,
Star Wars
toys were the only movie merchandise that existed in any significant quantity. George Lucas had craftily waived his up-front fee as director for the original film and negotiated ownership of the licensing rights. A relieved studio, thinking
Star Wars
would be a flop, gratefully accepted. This decision earned George hundreds of millions of dollars, as he directly profited from all the licensed games, toys, and collectibles created for the franchise.

Mark asked me if there were any toys missing from my
Star Wars
collection. “Oh yes,” I said, and I wrote out an enormous list covering two sides of a sheet of paper that detailed exactly which toys I didn’t have and handed it over with a hopeful grin. The very next day Mark appeared on the set laden down with dozens of boxes and bags and presented me with the entire collection, the whole lot. What a guy!

“Just swing the bolas around your head, Warwick,” David urged, “just like a lasso.” That was the limit of my weapons training for the final battle scenes on Endor. David wanted to capture a funny scene – after all, nothing’s funnier than when something ridiculous happens in the heat of a deadly epic battle. How would Stan Laurel have played this, I wondered?

Bolas are a throwing weapon made up of a short length of rope with two rocks tied to either end. The original idea was to get them around the legs of your prey but, humans being humans, they’ve also been adapted for use on enemy soldiers. The Ewoks used bolas to great effect by throwing them around the necks of Stormtroopers and knocking them out with the rocks.

In the film we see one Ewok after another taking down several Stormtroopers with the bolas – until you get to young Wicket, who entangles himself in the deadly weapon and is hit in the head by his own bolas.

When the rocks hit me, my head made the same noise as a coconut being hit with a bat. I then did a pretty good impression of Stan Laurel being walloped on the head by Oliver Hardy with a mallet in
Way Out West
: a slight pirouette before falling with great speed toward the ground. To my surprise, there had been a communication breakdown between the various props people – the crash mat that was supposed to be below me had been tidied away, no doubt trying to prevent Ewok trip-ups – so I hit the floor hard (thankfully the foam padding of my Wicket costume absorbed the worst of the impact).

That was my first lesson in the pain involved in physical comedy. I now take great pleasure in reenacting that scene at
Star Wars
conventions (with the original bolas and a cushion) and it always goes down a storm.

Maybe it was the air or the fact that we were no longer at home, but moving the production to the U.S. seemed to turn everyone into practical jokers. My favorite incident was a dastardly plan hatched by the entire Ewok cast. We donned our costumes and bombarded the canteen with water bombs, just as the stars and crew were having lunch. God knows what they thought as they saw forty Ewoks charging them with water-filled balloons.

“Ah, ah!” we said smugly, wagging our fingers forbiddingly, as some enterprising crew members prepared to launch their retaliation in the form of jam doughnuts. “We’re in costume!” They couldn’t attack without ruining our costumes and thereby the rest of the day’s filming.

On another occasion we sent the Ewok bus up to the set with a note saying that the Ewoks had had enough and were on their way to the airport (which for some people was only a half-joke). Production assistant Ian Bryce, who received the note, flew into such a panic as a result that he leapt into a car and headed off at top speed to the airport to try to talk us out of going. Fortunately, he got a flat tire just after he left and when our bus pulled up a second time, we were all wearing T-shirts that read
Revenge of the Ewok
.

I didn’t realize but as the only kid on the set apart from Nicky, I was a kind of moral guardian. All the other actors were on their best behavior whenever I showed up; booze was put away, cigarettes were stubbed out, swearing and dirty jokes were halted midflow, and so on.

The whole
Jedi
experience was great; I had no idea that this was a defining time in my life; at the time it felt like I’d won an amazing competition. As we finished filming the last Ewok scene and the cry “Heads off!” echoed through the redwood forest for the final time, one Ewok actor said with some passion, “Well, thank God that’s over!” While many of my fellow Ewok actors were truly grateful that their costumed torture had finally come to an end, I moped about miserably. I did not relish the idea of leaving this galaxy of adventure for a life of normaldom.

To mark the end of principal photography, the producers organized a wrap party for all cast and crew. I managed to miss most of this by falling asleep. There’s a picture of me out cold on a chair during the Ewok wrap party with Carrie Fisher behind me, her finger over her mouth, going “Shhhh!”

The day after the wrap party I said my good-byes to everyone, from George the chicken to George the Jedi Master, from Ray the wise surfer dude, to Carrie, Mark, and Harrison, from Nicky to Kenny, not forgetting Sal and Phil – two little people who became my friends and both married very tall girls who happened to be twins.
^a

I was leaving so many friends and it was utterly heartbreaking. Still, at least we arrived back in the UK just in time for the school summer holidays. I was glum but grudgingly glad to be back home when Dad said the magic words: “Warwick, how would you like a holiday in the caravan?”

^a
They divorced. Both of them.

Chapter Four

The Caravan of Courage

The Davis family loved caravanning – Dad was probably the only man in the UK who towed his with an E-type Jag.

 

A rare sunny day in a field next to a pub.

 

This is more like it. If you weren’t careful during the night, you could end up frozen to the condensation on the window.

 

The first caravan we owned was called a Monza. It sounds exciting, as if it were something sleek and luxurious, like a Grand Prix driver’s mobile dressing room. In reality it was a shed on wheels. The condensation that covered the inside of the single-glazed windows would turn into ice on a cold morning.

Water was pumped into the sink using a foot pedal, causing the Monza to sway rudely from side to side; simply washing up would leave Mum exhausted. About the quality and weight of a good piece of tinder, the caravan was lit by gas. It wasn’t as if we couldn’t afford something better – my dad was well off, he had a good job, and even used his silver E-type Jaguar to tow the box on wheels.

The four of us somehow managed to bed down fairly comfortably each night. However, I had to be careful I didn’t roll over onto the window in my sleep otherwise I’d wake up frozen to the glass.

Despite this we loved it and we loved caravanning. We’d been going on holidays to Cornwall, Wales, and Devon for as long as I could remember. After the Jag, we had an ancient but loyal Ford Cortina wagon. Dad would take advantage of this by leaving very early in the morning. He’d pack everything else before folding down the back seats, lifting us out of our beds, still sleeping, and carrying us along with our bedclothes into the wagon part of the car. He’d close the hatch very quietly and my parents then enjoyed a peaceful early morning drive without choruses of “Are we there yet?” or “I’m bored!” or “Can we stop at the Little Chef ?
^a
Can we, can we, can we, can we, can we?” Instead my sister and I would wake up in some strange new land, discovering we were indeed already “there,” wherever “there” was.

“There” was usually in a field next to a pub where I’d have something in a basket (something that looked and tasted a little bit like chicken) and a Britvic orange. Even to me, the Britvic bottles were tiny, but I did love a Britvic. As long as I had that and a packet of Salt’n’Shake crisps I was happy.

We’d cycle our bikes around the caravan site while Mum and Dad sunbathed. I loved bikes. My first was a little silver model that had clearly been constructed for a much younger rider, but it suited my purposes to a T. I could reach the pedals and, to me at least, it felt like the fastest thing in the world.

I usually found myself quite frustrated that we’d come all this way and now all Mum and Dad wanted to do was sit there and do nothing. Nothing whatsoever. “Don’t you want to do
something
?” I’d ask. “
Anything?
” Now I’m a parent myself, I know where they were coming from, just how precious and restorative the act of doing nothing, just sitting and looking at the view, can be.

In the evenings we’d play board games, especially Monopoly, usually while listening to Radio Two. Very often this would be inside the caravan because it was raining outside. It was a very simple way of holidaying and if that sounds a little depressing to read now, it wasn’t at all. I loved every single moment.

It scares me just how much “stuff” there is to keep today’s generation busy on holiday, such as PlayStations, DVDs, satellite TV, mobile phones. None of these things existed in our Monza almost thirty years ago. There was just the four of us, a deck of cards, Radio Two, and the rain.

We mainly stuck to England although I do recall seeing an awful lot of ruined Welsh castles during one especially damp and misty trip. We also once bravely journeyed to Scotland, where we spent two days in the freezing rain before quickly heading south again as fast as the Monza would allow. We never returned.

Dad wasn’t so keen on crowds on holiday so we avoided busy beaches. When he selected a caravan site he didn’t look to see if it had the kid-friendly things such as a playground or a nearby fair, horse rides and so on. The important thing for him was that it was adjacent to a pub. Country pubs often used to have a field next door that they’d let out to caravanners, guaranteeing them a steady trade of fatigued parents and overexcitable children. Dad would then be able to enjoy the luxury of a leisurely lunch in a pub before swaying back to the caravan for a good long afternoon’s stare at the scenery.

It wasn’t long after we returned from another caravanning holiday in 1983 that the newly renamed
Return of the Jedi
(George felt this new title was more in keeping with Jedi philosophy) was ready to be shown, and on the Sunday before the world premiere we went to the cast and crew screening at the Marble Arch Odeon, London.

Goose bumps rose as the main titles rolled and I watched in utter fascination and amazement as the images began to appear. Elstree was utterly convincing as Endor, a thousand times better than I thought possible. Endor and the Ewok Village looked a lot darker than I remembered (we had been filming under very strong studio lights) and this darkness made it all look so much more realistic.

I noticed that a lot of scenes had been cut – there was one where I found and fired a Stormtrooper’s blaster that hadn’t made it—but I was delighted to see the bolas scene and even more delighted by the roar of laughter that erupted from the audience when I took a tumble. It had been worth the pain. I was also amazed to hear Wicket speaking in an alien language – I hadn’t heard it until then.
^b
And no one ever called the Ewoks “Ewoks” in the film. Han Solo called them “furballs” a few times. But no one referred to them as “Ewoks.” No one had an explanation as to why; it just turned out that way.

Before I knew it the credits were rolling – and then there it was:

Wicket: WARWICK DAVIS.

Very cool.

The film was a huge success, critically (although some reviewers thought the Ewok victory over the Empire stretched credibility somewhat. Credibility? Come on, this is
Star Wars
, people!) and financially – it grossed over $250 million from a $32 million budget.

Meanwhile, school loomed like the Death Star over the end of the summer holidays. I was thirteen and due to start my secondary education at the City of London Freeman’s School in Surrey. It was big in every sense of the word. The distance between classrooms could be over a mile (at least that’s how it seemed to me) and the textbooks, when stacked in a pile, towered over my head. I couldn’t carry them so I got a trolley and I sprinted the vast distance between lessons, my cart bumping behind me as I went.

The first day was a blur. There were plenty of curious stares and some surprised looks when a voice said loudly from knee height, “Excuse me! Coming through here!” but everyone was very pleasant and I was never bullied once.

Word gradually leaked out that I’d been in
Jedi
and I received a certain degree of attention as a result. When you’re my height it’s strangely hard to hide, so the best way for me to cope was to embrace my fellow pupils’ curiosity. If there was one thing I’d learned from
Jedi
, apart from Ewokese, it was to be myself. As Ray my surfer dude teacher had said: “People will like you for who you are, Warwick. There’s no need for acting in the real world.” I made loads of great friends at secondary school, many of whom I’m still in touch with now.

As well as friends I also attracted my very own stalker: Daniel. He was already over six feet tall, skinny as a rake, into heavy metal, with long, long fair hair and always, always clad in black (imagine a young Stephen Merchant, but with longer, stragglier hair). He was also obsessed with
Star Wars
and with Princess Leia in particular. To say he had a
huge
crush on Carrie Fisher was an understatement.

“Awight there?”

“Hello,” I replied cautiously. Daniel looked so extraordinary to me I didn’t know what to make of him.

“So . . . er,” he said.