Warwick Davis: ‘Being angry would be a waste of my life’
|
Version 0 of 1. “Well, as you get older, it gets worse,” Warwick Davis says, swinging his legs off the edge of his seat. “Your joints, for a start. My hips are dislocated, so they’re sitting out here. Very painful knees. I had surgery on my feet when I was very young. There’s a risk of retinal detachment, but I know the signs now. And then, yeah, you wake up, the alarm goes, it takes a good half hour to get moving, we’re both like, ‘Uggggh.’ Imagine the worst flu you’ve had, every day – it’s like that.” Davis is speaking in a hotel room in Canary Wharf in London, a few minutes from the O2 Arena, where he’ll shortly head as an honoured guest of ITV at the National Television Awards. He’s half-ready, in braces and smart trousers, and, as he runs through his fairly gruesome list, he fumbles with the zip on the back of his wife Sam’s dress. Sam also has dwarfism. In her case, it’s caused by a condition called achondroplasia; in his, it’s the much rarer, and mercifully abbreviated, spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita (SED). She nods as he goes on. “With my elbow at the minute,” he says, “it will lock” – he holds his left arm in a stiff salute to demonstrate – “and then I’ll have to rotate it to be able to straighten it again, like” – he brings the arm down, turns it, and I’m sure there’s a queasy click – “that. You look at somebody with dwarfism, the first thing that strikes you is probably that they’re short, and that’s it. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. It gets worse. Could be a cleft palate, hearing loss – or you end up in a wheelchair.” It’s possible that this recitation has left me looking a little dazed, because Davis fixes his eyes on me with some concern and grins. “It’s not ‘get out the violin’,” he says. “I mean, I’m not one for doctors. GP once a year. Unless it’s really broken, I don’t agree with fixing it. Nature figures it out.” Even accepting this slightly dubious medical theory, it’s a hell of a list. It isn’t even the worst thing that the Davis family have faced as a result of their genetic circumstances, not by a long way: two sons, George and Lloyd, died as babies. Their other children, Annabelle and Harrison, face the same health problems as their parents. Life, it is safe to say, has not been easy. And so I’m a little amazed when, a few minutes later, I ask Davis if he is a religious person and he says, with what seems like a genuine sense of wonder, “My life, and Sam’s as well, there are so many fortuitous things that occur – it can’t be a coincidence.” It depends, I guess, on what you choose to focus on. And it’s true that, by many measures, Warwick Davis’s life has been touched with the most extraordinary luck. His big break came in 1982, when he was 12: the actor playing lead Ewok Wicket in Return of the Jedi fell ill, and George Lucas plucked him from the serried Ewok ranks as a replacement. (He’s back in JJ Abrams’s Star Wars reboot, but he’s not allowed to talk about it.) Since then, he has enjoyed a sustained and successful acting career, albeit, as he says, “pretty anonymously, because all the stuff I was playing was behind masks and prosthetics and things” – variously as a leprechaun, a goblin and an android. Then, in 2011, playing a rather unfamiliar version of himself as an arrogant and disgruntled actor in Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short, his face became familiar, and then ubiquitous. At the age of 39, he became properly famous. Since then, it has sometimes feels as if he’s become television’s designated dwarf, the closest British analogue to Game of Thrones’s Peter Dinklage, able to play roles defined by something other than his height while his fellow short actors remain confined to horror and pantomime. He’s branched out into presenting, too, hosting primetime ITV entertainment like Celebrity Squares and now Planet’s Got Talent, his orthodox geniality lifted by a hint of Gervaisean side-eye. The channel appears to have decided that he is a good and popular thing. Meanwhile, as part of BBC Two’s revival of its highly regarded Modern Times strand, he is the subject of a documentary following his attempt to put on a touring show featuring only short actors in mainstream parts that make no reference to their height, perhaps in the hope of expanding his club beyond a membership of one. It’s a moment, and he’s making the most of it, but it’s striking that when he talks about how life has changed he articulates it as an opportunity granted, rather than seized: maybe that’s how it feels when the limits on your professional life have always been external, less to do with what you can do than how people see you. “These past couple of years, the doors just seem to have been thrown open wide,” he says. “When I present Celebrity Squares, I fully appreciate that I’ve been allowed to do that – when I think of all the doors I’ve knocked on, and now people are saying, yeah, all right, Warwick, you can host this show.” Gratitude notwithstanding, the most striking thing about Warwick Davis’s attitude to fame is that he barely seems to have noticed it. He is just as unsentimental about public recognition as he is about his health, and just as clear-eyed about the limited usefulness of letting it become a preoccupation. He’s just normal. So many celebrities try to create this impression – with accounts of how firmly their feet are planted on the ground, childhood friends, tucking into the least healthy thing on the menu, all that – that I fear this will seem credulous, but with Davis there’s no trace of affectation about it. “Annoying, isn’t it,” he grumbles, as he works his way through room-service chips and a mozzarella and tomato panini, “that when you ask for a cheese sandwich they can’t just give you a cheese sandwich?” And there’s the story he tells about a trip alone to McDonald’s where he had to jump up and down, and eventually ask a passer-by to activate the sensor above the automatic doors. The most striking thing about this is not the well-worn anecdote of the complexities of life with SED, but the fact that this is a successful TV star of 44 who goes to McDonald’s on his own. “There’s just no grandiosity at all,” says Ursula Macfarlane, the documentary maker who followed Davis for Modern Times. “When we were travelling, we’d stay in Premier Inns together, and when he was on tour in England he would drive back after the show whenever he could to take his kids to school in the morning. I think it’s a really conscious thing. They don’t want to live in a different sort of world, perhaps because they’re different anyway – they want to say, we’re like everybody else.” Perhaps, too, it’s because, as Sam points out in the film, the family gets photographed even when Warwick isn’t around: for someone whose whole life has been spent drawing attention, the culture shock of celebrity isn’t nearly so sharp. That comes through in everything. Consider the deeply pleasurable Weekend Escapes with Warwick Davis, a series that followed the family on the kind of holidays they like best: trips around Britain in a campervan, playing Monopoly when they stop for the night. We see Davis expressing real enthusiasm for a best stick competition at the Lakeland Country Fair, and there’s no way he’s faking it. Or consider the domestic set-up, in which only the kitchen is altered in deference to the family’s size. “We don’t get any help,” Sam says. “We’re stubborn.” Davis changes the lightbulbs, waiting until four or five blow before getting out the ladder; the operation to move the washing machine, as he describes it, was a jerry-rigged triumph familiar to anyone with a dad who considers himself a bit handy. “We were scratching our heads, but I’d seen this documentary about the building of Stonehenge,” he says with relish, “and I was like, they used rollers! So we got all this dowelling out of the garage, laid it out, the machine’s rolling along, we’re taking the pieces of wood from one end to the other as it goes; took us a good hour longer than it would have anyone else. But we achieved it.” He’s not rich, either, he’s at pains to point out – certainly not rich enough to feel comfortable turning work down. “It annoys me that everyone thinks actors are all loaded,” he says. “I don’t have credit cards, I don’t believe in spending it unless you’ve got it. In my line of work, if you don’t get a job to pay it off, you’re in trouble.” In the Modern Times film, the worry that seems to eat at Davis most of all is not the dramatic success of the production, nor even the health of Sam, who undergoes a dangerous operation in the course of filming and is told she could be at risk of paralysis; it’s the financial burden that the show brings with it. Putting it on took all of the family’s savings; if the production is a failure, they could lose their home. “We’re used to hospitals,” Davis says. “But goodness me, you wouldn’t believe how much it costs to put on a play. Every ten pounds starts to matter. You become so tight, because everything you spend equates to another ticket sale.” We see this most clearly, and most affectingly, in Davis’s determination that the play – a classic farce – be staged on a set that’s cut down to the cast’s proportions. As they look around their second-hand 1940s drawing room, the rest of the production team feel it’s too expensive, a waste of time. “It would look odd,” one of them says reasonably. “Not in full ratio with everything else. It would have to be so small.” There’s a pause, and Davis replies, “But then you could say we’re too small for it as well.” Davis is not, in general, an uncompromising man, but later he comes back to the prop store on his own and oversees a team of carpenters painstakingly making it work, this creation of a world in perfect proportion, so at odds with his own home. How much did it cost, I wonder? “Ten grand,” he says, looking a bit pained. “Ten grand’s worth more tickets you have to sell. But it was worth it.” The stated aim of the production is for the audience to forget the height of the cast within the first five minutes. But the idea of mainstream height-blind casting is still pretty implausible. It struck me as practically useful that the play in question was a farce, neutralising the danger of laughter at the wrong moments. As Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree, a remarkable study of the complexities of family life with “difficult” children, observes of his time reporting on dwarfism, “Dwarves have to deal, more than people in any other disability group, with the perception of themselves as comical. I found that when I had gone to a dwarf convention and came back and talked about it: people who were full of empathy for other conditions ... all immediately needed to make jokes.” Next up, Davis plans a murder mystery. Does he see a risk of a cruel snigger at a bad moment? Could there ever be a dwarf Lear? “It’s an interesting debate,” he says. “I love the roles that I’ve played, and many of them have been necessarily short. I’m very proud of everything I’ve done, even the Leprechaun movies. But yes, it would be lovely to have short actors do roles where it was just incidental. Years ago, yes, we needed explanation. But I think we’re a bit more sophisticated now.” I wonder if he could ever see himself successfully pitching a sitcom in which his size is more or less irrelevant. “It would be brilliant to throw a curveball and steer away totally from height jokes,” he says. “But the thing is, that’s not the way I live. I seize the opportunity to make a joke. I’m amused by it myself.” You might think that this no-nonsense position hides some deeper disquiet. Not a bit of it, says Ursula Macfarlane. “In the film, some of the other members of the cast talked quite deeply about it all. But they have very different life experiences. That’s just not Warwick. He’s thought about it, he’s articulate about it, he gets asked the same questions – but he and his family are the most positive people I’ve ever met. I don’t think it’s masking something else.” When I talked to Davis, I approached this basic question – of luck and fairness and whether he feels blessed or hard-done-by – several times. None of the answers felt especially illuminating: instead, he speaks in aphorisms that explain little, but are highly effective as tools for living. He and Sam have simply decided to be happy. Even when they remember Lloyd and George, says Sam, they think about the time they did have, not the time they didn’t. “You have a choice, don’t you?” she says. “Let’s use it to make our family stronger, closer. Life is for living.” “Being angry,” says Davis, “would be a waste of time. A waste of the life that you do have. Yes, between the two of us, I suppose there are moments where sometimes, we just go, aargh – everything is that little bit more difficult. But I only get angry about twice a year.” And what about the way the topic dominates the conversation? What about the fact that, even now, even as an established star, a game show host, a comedian and an actor and producer, an interview like this will always turn back, in the end, to a genetic accident? “Well,” Davis says, puffing out his lower lip and shrugging. “It’s my USP, isn’t it?” And, after all, it’s working out pretty well. He uses his bad arm to describe the arc of his career to date. “My life’s like a graph,” he says. “And it’s going up and up and up.” Modern Times: Warwick Davis’s Big Night is on BBC Two on 5 February at 9pm |