She peered over the top of her desk and watched as I flapped around in a panic below her.
“Oh,” she said in a thick Essex accent, “I’m not sure we’ve got one.” She placed a finger to her lips and pondered. The shouts from the rehearsal room were getting louder.
“It’s quite urgent,” I said, trying to restrain my rising panic.
“No, wait a minute, yes we do.”
She disappeared into a back office and came back a few seconds later.
“What sort of fire is it? Only we’ve got different extinguishers for different fires.”
“I don’t care! Just give me one that squirts something!”
Eventually, a few very long seconds later, she returned with a fire extinguisher.
“There you go,” and she dropped it into my arms.
Now, bearing in mind I’m not much taller or heavier than a standard fire extinguisher, the damn thing nearly flattened me. I half-carried, half-dragged it back into the maelstrom, where we quickly got the flames under control.
“I think that concludes rehearsals,” I said as the foam and smoke settled around us. We quickly marched out under a cloud (literally). The nightclub owners never said a thing.
I once took a booking for a show and wouldn’t tell the lads what it was, just that it was somewhere in central London, giving them the address at the last minute. It was only when the music started and they ran onto the stage that they were confronted by a roomful of screaming men in leather and piercings.
“The little git’s booked us into a gay club!”
Still, they pulled it off, so to speak, and escaped intact. They planned to kill me as soon as the show was over but I managed to lie low until they’d calmed down.
Finally, after two incredible years, the guys were exhausted, the Velcro had lost its grip, and we decided it was time they hung up their G-strings, while they were still at the height of their popularity.
Just as they did so, it was also time for me to dig out my shiny-buckled shoes, re-don my little green hat, and speak the immortal line: “Flee while you can, the future’s not good – for no one is safe from a Lep in the ’hood!”
With Peter Burroughs, father-in-law and co-founder of Willow Personal Management as well as The Half Monty.
a Oh yes it is!
b What Dave Vear lacked in height he did his best to make up for in girth.
c He danced to “Hot! Hot! Hot!”
Chapter Seventeen
Guess Who’s Back?
Guess who’s back? This time for Lep in the Hood and Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood, parts five and six of the unbelievably (in the truest sense of the word) successful franchise.
They were always finding new ways to kill the Leprechaun. On this occasion I was dumped in “cement” (actually porridge).
Lunch break: Eating Chinese food on the streets of South Central L.A. while gunfire echoed through the night. Life didn’t get any more surreal than that.
Once again, Leprechaun in Space had been a great financial success, if not a critical one: “The best movie I’ve seen about a leprechaun in space in years,” and “Do you really need to know any more than the title?”
The producers were determined to make another one but needed to come up with a novel situation in which to put the Leprechaun. They took their job very seriously and formed a focus group to find out who watches the Leprechaun films. After much research they concluded that the audience was mainly made up of black Americans.
Needless to say, for Leprechaun in the Hood: Lep in the ’hood, come to do no good! I was the only green actor on the set. Every which way I turned there was a rapper. And I had a new set of rules. The iron phobia was gone and now, to my surprise, they expected me to be able to rap.
I kept asking them for the lyrics but the writers just said, “Don’t worry, we’ll just write them on the day.” I went to my fellow cast members for advice on how to rap. These included Coolio and Ice-T (his real name’s Tracy, I kid you not), among many other rap luminaries. They all thought it was very cool to be in a Leprechaun film and they seemed to be having a blast. They were very kind and did their best to teach me how to rap. They even showed me some dance moves and taught me how to fold my arms like a proper gangsta but you just can’t become a gangsta rapper overnight, especially when your ’hood, back in the day, was leafy Surrey.
When we eventually did the song I was pretty pleased with it and I thought it might go out as a single. I could see myself performing it on MTV and even today I get requests for the “Leprechaun Rap” at conventions. I always pretend I’ve forgotten the lyrics but I must confess that I recall every single word.
Not long after we’d started shooting, Ice-T burst into my trailer in a panic and started uprooting sofa cushions. “I think, I hope, I left something here,” he said. Ice-T was a cardboardcutout version of a rapper; he was always “in character” and rolled up on the set in a massive Merc playing his own music full blast. Eventually, with a sigh of relief, he lifted up the thickest gold chain I’d ever seen. How could you lose something like that? I mean, a ring, fair enough, but a gold chain that weighed more than my daughter?
We filmed the interior scenes for Lep in the Hood at Lacy Street Studios – where Cagney and Lacey had been filmed. All of the sets were identical, none of them had been changed since the TV series.
Things got a lot more interesting, however, when we moved out into the street. We filmed mainly at night in L.A.’s notorious gangsta ’hood, South Central, which presented a whole different kind of horror.
“Ready, Warwick?”
I nodded uncertainly. I was in full Leprechaun costume halfway up a tree in South Central, L.A. How ready could I be?
I was supposed to leap onto a young female victim who was walking along the street below and would then be rescued by her boyfriend who happened to pass by on his motorbike while carrying a baseball bat.
“And action!”
Just as I prepared to launch myself, a couple of not-too-distant gunshots from a .357 Magnuma echoed through the night.
Suddenly distracted, I lost my footing, missed my cue, and landed facedown on the pavement below.
“Are you okay, Warwick?”
“Grrrrnfh,” I said, slowly raising my clawed hand to give the thumbs-up.
In order to film there safely we had to pay our respects to the gang that ran the neighborhood – very smartly dressed young gentlemen who all rode sports bikes. They’d roll up, engines at full revs, and bring everything to a halt, ignoring the fact that this was a “closed set,” and check out anything they wanted, whenever they wanted. Nobody dared stop them.
At first, because I was dressed in green, I worried that I might be wearing the wrong color. So much of gangland was defined by the colors the people wore, red and blue for the Bloods and Crips respectively, for example. I was very relieved when one of the crew told me that the gangs saw green as a neutral color.
Amazingly, they seemed to be scared of me; I was always in full costume and I think they actually believed that this was how I looked all the time. Even most of the crew didn’t really want to eat with me – except for Gabe, the makeup artist. I suppose only Dr. Frankenstein could have lunch with his monster. There’s a very surreal photo of me sitting on a wooden crate, alone, in costume in the middle of the road right in the heart of gangland, eating Chinese food out of a carton.
My fellow rappers, however, were familiar with the films and were thrilled to see my character. And thanks to their involvement there was quite a bit of interest in the film from MTV. I appeared on a few chat shows in New York, including Greg Kinnear, but the best thing I did was a skit for MTV in full costume on their Beauty and the Beach show in San Diego.
Gabe and I had a good laugh about this when we rolled into San Diego. “Who’d have thought it?” Gabe said, “I can’t believe we’re five films down the road and about to go on mainstream TV!”
For the San Diego job, Gabe came and made me up as the Leprechaun in
a hotel room. This meant a half-mile walk from the hotel to the event – in full costume. I got into the elevator and a Hispanic cleaner ran out screaming down the hall. Feeling a bit playful, I decided to chase her and when she ran back into the elevator I jumped in behind her just as the doors were closing and laughed like a maniac. She screamed until I thought my eardrums would burst. I dropped the act and tried to reassure her on the way down that I was wearing makeup, that I wasn’t “real,” it didn’t help; I left the poor woman in a very confused and dazed state, mumbling incoherently in the corner of the elevator.
I then strolled down to the beach where hundreds of beautiful college girls and handsome college boys were waiting for me to judge a beauty contest. I kid you not. I was on the panel with one of the guys from Baywatch and he didn’t know if I was real or not. I decided the best way to play this was to take the judging completely seriously. I tried to do it in the style of Simon Cowell crossed with the Leprechaun and was suitably disparaging to all of the contestants.
Lep in the Hood was a smash hit. “Actually physically painful to watch,” wrote one reviewer. “If you need a reason to hate yourself, a reason to want to do yourself bodily harm, or a reason to go completely insane with no hope of recovery, watch Leprechaun in the Hood,” and “I must say, I didn’t think that Leprechaun 4 could be followed. Man, was I wrong.”
As it turned out I was nominated for a Video Premiere Awardb in the Best Actor category in 2001, which was great because I became part of the VPA Academy and received free DVDs of all nominated movies for life.
It was a tough year; I was up against Jean-Claude Van Damme (Replicant), Fred Ward (Full Disclosure), and Christopher Lloyd (When Good Ghouls Go Bad). We all lost out to Courtney B. Vance, who played the lead in Love and Action in Chicago, the tagline of which was: “A hit man rethinks his celibacy.” Like I said, it was a tough year.
Number six, Back 2 tha Hood, followed soon after. In that film I smoked a bong that was as big as me. It was filled with herbal tobacco and it made me half-laugh and half-choke, which helped me produce the most evil cackle I’ve ever done. There are a couple of Laurel and Hardy slapstick moments where after getting stoned I fall over flat on my back – it felt fine at the time but I was in agony the next day.
At one point I get the munchies and attack the fridge but I’m supposed to get stuck inside when somebody knocks the fridge door shut with their butt.
“Couldn’t you have bought a bigger fridge”? I asked, not unreasonably, I thought. “It’s tiny.”
“But you’re tiny,” the props guy said, trying to force me inside. “Come on, get your other arm in.”
“I can’t,” I protested, shoving a carton of milk and some salami to one side, “I’m going to come out box-shaped!”
Eventually, with my nose compressed against a tube of Squeezey Cheese, the door was shut and we got the scene.
At the end of this “episode,” the Leprechaun was killed by being pushed into quick-drying cement. The cement was actually edible, a kind of gray porridge. The effects guys stayed up all night making a huge vat of the stuff.
The pressure was really on as we only had one shot at nailing this scene. Once I landed in the “cement,” my costume and prosthetics would be a write-off.
“When you fall in,” the stunt coordinator said, “just lie back and you’ll gradually sink.”
When the cry of “Action!” finally came, I fell back screaming onto the huge vat of porridge. The first thing I noticed was that it was shockingly cold. After a few seconds I realized that I wasn’t going to sink – the “porridge” was too thick.
There were some weights at the bottom, which I was supposed to grab once I’d sunk, so I wouldn’t float to the surface too soon, ruining the scene. I pushed my arms down, found one of the weights, and pulled myself under. Psychologically, this is a hard thing to do – as the cold, gloopy mess closed around me I took a breath, shut my eyes, and stayed below the surface for as long as I could.
Once I resurfaced I looked like . . . like . . . er – well, like a leprechaun that had fallen into an enormous bowl of porridge. I was completely covered and the gloop was really seriously stuck to me. I could hardly open my eyes.
A voice came from the darkness: “Over here, Warwick!”
I turned, forced an eye open, and saw a grinning stagehand holding a hose.
“Oh, kaggernash!”
A freezing-cold jet of water hit me, almost lifting me off my feet. Ah, the glamour of showbiz. As the Leprechaun I’d been killed in a huge variety of innovative ways: I’d been dissolved in a well, impaled with an iron bar, exploded twice (once in space), been annihilated with a flamethrower, and now drowned in the cement foundations of a skyscraper.
The only Leprechaun film I didn’t die in was Lep in the Hood, although some rappers might argue otherwise, as the movie finished with me performing the “Leprechaun Rap.”
Now to the burning question that millions, ahem, of Leprechaun fans have been speculating about for some years now: Will there be another Leprechaun film?
Well, a pitch meeting to “reboot” the franchise has been held with Lionsgate Entertainment. The concept was to do it in 3-D. These films are much better than the days of the red and green glasses. As long as the films don’t use 3-D as a gimmick, then I think it’s fine. I’d relish the chance to waggle my 3-D shillelagh at moviegoing audiences around the world.
My own idea is to make a pirate-themed Leprechaun. All the ingredients are there for a perfect Leprechaun movie: pirates, chests full of gold, parrots, wooden legs, maidens, eye-patches, sword fights, cannonballs, and so on.
I know the Leprechaun movie franchise is not to everyone’s taste but I had a great time making them and I’m proud of my performances in every one of those crazy films. I’m doubly proud that I had my own horror franchise.
Now, however, I was about to become a small part in an enormous movie franchise, the biggest and most successful the world has ever seen.
It was a story that started with a young would-be wizard . . .
a If there’s one thing you learn in South Central, it’s gun types. When gunshots echo through the night the usual conversation goes something like:
“Smith and Wesson 45.”
“Nah, sounded like a .22 to me.”
I would then say something like: “Shouldn’t we call the police?” which would cause much hilarity among the cast and crew.
b In other words, films that went “straight to video” without a cinema release.
Chapter Eighteen
Pottering About
At the premiere of the very last Harry Potter film. It took us two and a half hours to walk the three-quarters-of-a-mile-long red carpet from Trafalgar Square to the movie theater in Leicester Square.
Back in the UK I filmed an episode of Murder Rooms, a series based on the “real-life” adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. In what was yet another glamorous role, I played a traveling showman with a very sensitive medical problem, namely hemorrhoids.
Of course, I came to Conan Doyle (Charles Edwards) to seek relief. The procedure involved the employment of a device that looked like an enormous pair of metal tongs. The scene was shot from the front, and I pulled appropriately apprehensive expressions as I dropped my britches and bent over a chair. I then looked suitably agonized as the good doctor did his business around the rear.
Between takes, an actress told me that she’d been reading a wonderful book. I asked if there were any short characters in it and she said, “Lots!”
“That’s my kind of book.” I looked at the cover: “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Hmmm. Sounds interesting. I hope they make it into a film.”
Some months later, my agenta called, asking me if I’d like to read for the character of Professor Filius Flitwick.
By this time we were three books into what had arguably become the greatest publishing sensation of the twentieth century so the answer was a resounding �
��Yes please!” (as a bonus, I was pleased to see that Flitwick was in all three).
While this was terrific news, I knew it would nonetheless present a tremendous challenge for me. I’d be attempting to play a character already familiar to millions of readers around the world. Harry Potter fans all had a certain image in their mind of how the characters looked and behaved, so a great deal rode upon my interpretation.
I spent the night before my audition reading The Philosopher’s Stone. It’s strange really, I’ve never been a fan of fiction, I tend to prefer nonfiction books like the Guinness Book of Records, books about extreme weather, outer space, biographies, and so on. But when it comes to films, the more fantastical they are the more I like them.
Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis Page 20