I enjoyed the fast pace, as it gave my character energy and kept us all on our toes, but some of the crew found it hard to keep up. We seemed to burn through cameramen at an extraordinary rate. Every time I looked up another new face was staring at me through the eyepiece.
Rodman also came up with his own bizarre set of Leprechaun rules. He decided the Leprechaun couldn’t touch anything made of wrought iron and so the entire movie revolved around me touching or being imprisoned by iron (the Leprechaun has to trick his way out of an iron safe at one point).
According to mystic legend (a.k.a. Rodman), the Leprechaun can have the hand of any damsel who sneezes three times, explained in the immortal line: “She sneezes once, she sneezes twice, she’ll be me bride when she sneezes thrice!”
One can only presume there weren’t many allergies hundreds of years ago. After the heroine, in this case Bridget (played by a beautiful blond Shevonne Durkin), has sneezed the requisite three times, I tie her up in preparation for marriage.
In one very gross scene, I had to lick poor Shevonne’s face. Gabe, the crazy makeup guy, told me he had something very special in mind for this scene. He revealed he’d made a three-inch tongue extension that he wanted me to try. What’s more, the tongue had a fork, much like a snake’s.
“I can’t wear that!”
“I just have to dry your tongue and glue this on, it’ll be fine, trust me.”
Once it was fastened, he emptied half a tube of slime into my mouth so I could drool all over the unfortunate Shevonne before I gagged on the fake tongue. I’ve had to play some fairly outrageous scenes in my career but this was the most grotesque by far. Shevonne didn’t have to act when she winced in disgust.
Leprechaun 2 was made for even less money than the first and despite the snooty, if accurate reviews (Variety described it as “a nasty piece of business that revels in chicanery and gore,” although I appreciated the comment “Davis brings zest to his role despite having to maneuver through a ton of makeup”; damn right!), it was a roaring financial success.
This was bolstered somewhat by Wayne’s World 2, when Wayne (Mike Myers) induces a panic attack in Garth (Dana Carvey) by doing his impression of me as the Leprechaun. Wayne’s World and its sequel were two of the most popular movies of the early 1990s and that reference undoubtedly gave Leprechaun 2 a great lift and kept the franchise going.
Even though the Leprechaun exploded at the end of Leprechaun 2,a the producers had no trouble resurrecting him in Leprechaun 3 (Welcome to Vegas – the Odds Are You Won’t Leave Alive!). It was directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, who was known for his magical ability to make movies look expensive even though they’d been shot on a shoestring. He’d directed a number of cult Australian exploitation films (a.k.a. Ozploitation), including Turkey Shoot (1982), which reached number one in the UK box office charts on its release. Quentin Tarantino recently cited Brian as one of his favorite filmmakers.
Much of the shooting took place in the basement kitchens of the infamous Ambassador Hotel, where the first Academy Awards took place and where Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. There’s an “X” scored into a tile in the kitchen that marks the spot where he fell. The place had a really eerie feel at night and several of the crew said they saw strange things (probably just me in costume dashing to and from the bathroom).
The set designers turned the main ballroom (where Kennedy had given his last speech) into a casino with gaming machines that had been specially licensed so they could be used in California.
Even though the film was set in Vegas, our budget was such that we could film in Las Vegas for one night only. We stayed in the Mirage Hotel, an enormous 3,044-room monster that opened in 1989 – it had cost an incredible $630 million to build. It’s famous for its volcano fountain that erupts every night at 9 p.m. and for Siegfried and Roy’s magic show featuring a man-eating white tiger.b
Gabe turned my room into the makeup trailer, which was fine except for the fact that I had to then walk across the casino floor made up as the evil Leprechaun. Trying to look inconspicuous when you look like a cross between a Gremlin, the Grinch, and Yoda isn’t easy – you’ll only ever have a limited degree of success.
A large pancake-faced man wearing a Hawaiian shirt stopped me. He bent down and asked, “Hey, and who are you supposed to be, sonny?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I’m just here for a good time.”
He did a double take. Gabe had done such a good job with the makeup that a horrified look of awareness that I might be real slowly crept across the man’s broad sweaty features.
I carried on through the casino where some people were daft enough to think I was a lucky leprechaun and tried to touch me for good fortune. I guess that out of all the cities in the world, Las Vegas was the one place we could get away with this. An evil leprechaun was no big deal in a hotel full of white man-eating tigers, ventriloquists, seven-foot go-go dancers, and an entire circus in its parking lot.
If I’d done this in London I think the reaction would have been somewhat different: no one would dare say anything and would pretend they’d seen nothing, apart from the children, of course, who would be quickly whisked away by their embarrassed parents. And in Los Angeles I think I would probably have become a target for sharpshooters.
Brian kept us on such a shoestring that we didn’t even have all our filming permits, so this was a “guerrilla shoot.” I had to leap out of our van, run out into the streets followed by the camera and sound teams, start filming, hopefully get the shot we needed in one take, and then run off before the cops appeared and demanded to see our permission slips.
“Run around and behave like the Leprechaun!” was Brian’s only direction for most of these scenes. Filming was immediately interrupted on the Strip when some teenagers recognized me from the first film.
“Get rid of them! Walk down the Strip!” Brian yelled, looking around anxiously for cops. “Just act; do stuff!”
It was the weirdest feeling. I gradually got farther away from the crew until I was on my own, walking through downtown Vegas. Behave like the Leprechaun, he says? Right, I’ll show him!
The costume gave me freedom to misbehave; I was no longer Warwick, I was an evil little leprechaun! I tried to hitch rides and gave the finger when the cars wouldn’t pick me up. I hopped up and down and shook my fist at them. This was great! I could get away with anything!
Eventually, the van pulled up alongside me with a screech of tires, the door slid open, and I jumped inside. “That was great, Warwick,” Brian said, and with that our guerrilla shoot was concluded.
I was keen to appear on screen in a Leprechaun movie without my makeup and suggested to Brian that I make a cameo appearance as myself sitting in the background in one of the casino scenes. He thought it was a great idea, so the next day we visited a casino where I sat in front of a one-armed bandit with Samantha.
“I don’t know,” Brian said, “people might still recognize you too easily. You look like the Leprechaun.”
“Oh, cheers for that,” I said.
Despite the fact I looked nothing like that monster, Brian still insisted I wear a hat and plonked his fedora on my head. But at least the scene made the final cut, and if you’re watching very carefully you’ll spot Sam and me (it also made it into the trailer) working the slot machines, looking a bit like underage gamblers.
Leprechaun 3 was another underground hit and plans were soon under way for number four, but before the script was ready I had to fly back over to the UK for some urgent stilt-walking lessons.
My three-hour transformation into the Leprechaun.
a He blew up after being impaled on an iron bar.
b It lived up to its name a few years later when the tiger ate Siegfried. Or was it Roy? I can never remember.
Chapter Thirteen
Love and Biscuits
On the set of Leprechaun in Space. Why’s he in space? Surely we don’t need to explain that, do we? The extraordinary crea
ture in just his pants is Guy “My Little Tank” Siner of ‘Allo, ‘Allo! fame.
I had been whisked off to deepest Norfolk to meet an old clown who lived, much like Yoda, in a little bungalow in the swampy fens. As I climbed onto the stilts under the clown’s watchful gaze, I mumbled, “This really is something I thought I’d never have to do.”
“All right up there?” the old clown croaked. Wobbling like a man trying to stand at attention on a giant bowl of Jell-O, I nodded gingerly.
“Good,” he replied, and promptly pushed me over.
“What the hell?!” I yelled, my voice slightly muffled by the soft turf. He grinned.
“First rule of stilt-walking: overcome the fear of falling.”
His technique did not quite work as he had hoped. I developed a healthy fear of being pushed over by the nutty clown and became quite adept at walking away from him at great speed. This did help me to learn more quickly but not quite in the manner he’d hoped.
I needed to stilt-walk so that I could tower over Ted Danson in a scene for the American TV production of Gulliver’s Travels. I was supposed to be jealous that someone even shorter than me had shown up in Brobdingnag (the land of the giants) and had taken my place to become the Queen’s favorite jester.
It was great seeing the world from a “normal height” for once.
One day, while practicing in the clown’s garden, getting more and more used to the stilts, I wandered into his kitchen. “Wow, this is great,” I thought. I could reach his kettle and cupboards so I made us a cup of tea, and wondered whether stilts might have a practical application for Sam and me. In particular, I hadn’t been able to afford to have our kitchen customized and we’d never even opened the top cupboards.
Cooking, especially using frying pans on the stove, was a nightmare that involved several stools, nerves of steel, and a steady hand. Perhaps stilts would be a cheap solution. When I showed up with a pair under my arm, Sam was quick to respond.
“No way! I’m not having you stagger about on those with pans of boiling water.”
“Awww.”
So I traveled with my stilts to Portugal, where the filming was due to take place. I was horrified to learn that the location for my scene was a magnificent palace, complete with polished marble floors, hardly the same thing as the soft, peaty soil of Norfolk. Typical. Risking life and limb in the name of art once more.
I was, however, delighted to be playing opposite Ted Danson. Over eighty million people had recently watched his swan song on the hugely popular TV sitcom Cheers and this was his first major role since. It was an extraordinary production, one of those rare TV jewels where the special effects and costumes constantly dazzle alongside some terrific performances by an all-star cast.
Apart from stilt-walking on slippery floors,a the most amazing thing about filming Gulliver’s Travels was working with Peter O’Toole, Robert Hardy, and Edward Fox, mainly because they were all as mad as the proverbial box of frogs.
For example, during a break I went outside to stretch my legs and saw Peter and Edward silently playing catch with a piece of rubble. They were completely deadpan, they even looked a little bored, but there was simply nothing else to do. Actors find the oddest things to pass the long time between scenes. These days we can count our blessings because we have our iPhones to keep us amused.
On Gulliver’s Travels, one of the producers had a newfangled invention called a mobile telephone. It was the same size and weight as a brick. We gazed in wonder as he called another producer who was on his car phone on Hollywood Boulevard.
“Showoff,” Robert said.
“Damn him and his phone,” said O’Toole.
The very next day the same producer was struck by lightning while on the phone.b
The production was a huge success; it was the first to adapt all four parts of Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel and it collected Emmys, BAFTAs, and Royal Television Society Awards – almost as quickly as Ricky Gervais.
Eventually it was time to hang up my stilts and return to Peterborough. Looking at the local paper I saw that hypnotist Paul McKenna’s show had arrived at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge. I was really interested in hypnosis and neurolinguistics and so Sam and I went along.
I leapt up when he asked for volunteers and marched on stage with dozens of other people to the sound of Jean Michel Jarre. When Paul saw me he gave me a friendly wink before choosing me as one of the final ten volunteers who would take part in his show.
When Paul hypnotized me it felt wonderful. It was so relaxing; every time he said “Sleep,” I gratefully retreated into this beautiful, warm, and comforting place.
Paul made me think I was about to get into the ring to fight Mike Tyson and he had me jumping in the air and throwing punches in no time. It was so strange, I knew it wasn’t real, but at the same time I could see Tyson right there in front of me, I could hear the roar of the crowd, and felt my punches hit home.
“Okay, Warwick, that’s enough, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.”
I relaxed into my tranquil trance.
“Okay, Warwick, I now want you to give me your definition of true love. Think about this carefully, take your time, just say whatever is in your heart.”
I stood for a moment, calmly evaluating all the options. Hmmmm. What could it be? Aha! Suddenly I had it!
“So, Warwick, what is your definition of true love?”
Speaking in a loud clear voice I said: “Chocolate biscuits.”
Sam was not amused. Perhaps my saying chocolate biscuits was the expression of a subconscious desire for the thing I found most comforting, because there was nothing I loved more than sharing a pot of tea and a packet of McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive biscuits with Sam of an evening.c
Well, that’s my theory anyway and I’m sticking to it.
After the show was over, I left feeling terrific, really energized, and this stayed with me for several days.
Not long after, I met Paul at the premiere of Apollo 13 in Planet Hollywood in London. I asked him if it might be possible to hypnotize a director to give me a part.
“Oh, most certainly,” he said and winked.
I wasn’t sure if he was serious or not but he did tell me that we all have a safety mechanism built in which won’t let us do anything that doesn’t fit in with our own personal system of beliefs.
I was so fascinated by the concept that we can essentially make adjustments to our brains’ software using hypnosis and neuro-linguistics that I took lessons in hypnosis at the same school as Paul had. I’ve only ever used it on myself to reinforce positive thoughts and ambitions – to make sure life’s biscuit tin was always full.
Also squeezed in between the Leprechaun films was a project I’d really rather not mention. In fact, until I came to write this book, I’d almost managed to forget all about it. It was called Prince Valiant, and was based on the famous comic strip of the same name, and it was an absolute disaster from start to finish. As Pechet, Prince Valiant’s squire, I had quite a big part. Although the idea was great, it was poorly executed and very little about the production made any sense. The director seemed intent on partying all night long and giving roles to his friends – and the one and only Chesney Hawkes (not that there’s anything wrong with Chesney, of course, he’s a delightful man, it’s just that he wasn’t suited for the role of stable hand). Even the wonderful Joanna Lumley – who still managed to put in an amazing performance as Morgan le Fay – couldn’t save it.
Most of the actors were just happy to emerge with their careers still intact and hurriedly found other work before the film was premiered, panned, and bombed. It was with no little relief that I grabbed the script for the next Leprechaun movie and ran for the Hollywood Hills. But then I opened the script and . . . what was this? Leprechaun in space?
I have no idea what actually happened but I can imagine the production meeting went something like this.
Suit One: What to do with the Leprechaun next?
Suit Two: Put him in
space!
Suit Three: How did he get there?
Suit Two: Doesn’t matter.
Suit Three: But he died in the last film.
Suit Two: Doesn’t matter.
Suit Three: Get Brian Trenchard-Smith back, he can polish a turd, just look at Leprechaun 3.
Well, Brian polished for all he was worth on the truly unforgettable Leprechaun 4: In Space: One Small Step for Man . . . One Giant Leap of Terror, and actually did a pretty amazing job. He created extraordinary comic horrors out of nothing. Yes, I know it shows, but that was the whole point – the trashier the Leprechaun films looked, the more the horror fans seemed to like them.
Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis Page 16