Warwick Davis: The Fellowship 2025

The following interview appeared in the EE BAFTA Film Awards official 2025 Show Notes.

The year was 1977 and seven-year-old Warwick Davis was hoping to buy his first cinema ticket, to see a film called Star Wars.

A huge queue snaked around the venue, the Sutton Cinema in Surrey. After the film, as his mother did her make up, Davis sat on the end of her bed and recited the entire plot of A New Hope, “which actually took longer than the film’s two-hour running time,” says the actor. “I told her about Luke Skywalker, and how the lightsabers were so cool, and all the creatures,” he remembers. “Just talking about it now, I could be seven again.”

Just a few years later, Davis was cast as an Ewok in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, the third instalment of George Lucas’ sci-fi fantasy phenomenon. It was the start of a prolific career. The British actor, comedian, presenter, producer and accessibility advocate, who was born with a rare form of dwarfism called
spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita, has starred in some of cinema’s biggest and most beloved franchises. Now, he is the recipient of this year’s BAFTA Fellowship.

Davis remembers meeting his on-screen heroes on the set of Return of the Jedi as “a naive 11-year-old.” In his view, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher were Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. “I didn’t understand that you couldn’t just wander up to the big stars and have a chat between takes,” he says. Not that this stopped him from approaching the other actors with curiosity and confidence. Davis credits his parents for encouraging him to make his own way in the world. “Even though I was very short” – 2’ 11” he says – “I had a big personality.”

Davis wasn’t a professional actor, but on Jedi he “instinctively became the character.” As the adorable, furry creature Wicket, he drew from his pet dog Brandy, a floppy-eared Cavalier King Charles. “My dog would tilt his head from side to side, because he was trying to understand what he was hearing. I remember thinking, that is so endearing,” he says. He started cocking his head to one side as Wicket. “I wish I could still do that now, as an actor,” he says. “As you get older, you become more conscious of what you’re doing.”

It was George Lucas who first recognised that actor’s instinct in Davis. In 1987, he cast the then-teenager as a pure-hearted sorcerer named Willow. Directed by Ron Howard, the film was the first time Davis had the opportunity to perform without hiding behind a mask. “It was totally different,” says Davis.

Howard, “an actor’s director,” told him to channel the leading man drawl of James Stewart. “It takes a big leap of faith, spending millions of dollars to put somebody like myself at the helm of a project like Willow,” he says. “I will forever be grateful.”

Those experiences would later make for great stories on the set of Harry Potter, in which the actor played the charms teacher Professor Flitwick. “I was surrounded by the great and good of British acting – I didn’t feel worthy of being amongst them,” he remembers. But Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson disagreed. On set, they would grill him about his long career. “You think, yes, I’ve got some history. I haven’t worked with John Gielgud in the theatre, but I’ve done Star Wars,” he says, grinning.

After Willow, Davis was conscious of being pigeonholed into one type of role. He had built a career playing “good characters” like Wicket, Willow, one of the Goblin Corps in Labyrinth, the noble mouse Reepicheep in the BBC’s The Chronicles of Narnia. It was a surprise, then, when he was cast in Leprechaun, a kids’ scary movie about a naughty elf “who did all sorts of mischievous things.” The studio recut the film as an R-rated horror and turned it into a hit: Leprechaun went on to spawn seven sequels.

There have been other times the actor has subverted expectations. In the comedy travel series An Idiot Abroad with Karl Pilkington, Davis says “you get to see the real me.” He also played an exaggerated (and sometimes unflattering) version of himself in Life’s Too Short, the TV mockumentary he created with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. “The slapstick elements of Life’s Too Short, like falling out of a car or climbing a bookshelf, came very naturally,” he says with a chuckle. Davis, whose inspirations include comedians Steve Coogan, Steve Martin, Will Ferrell and John Candy, wanted audiences to see that he could laugh at himself. “When you do something that is out of your comfort zone, it makes the audience look at you in a different way,” he says. Short actors, Davis has proved, can do more than just one thing.

Davis used his growing profile to found the acting agency Willow Management with his father-in-law, fellow short actor Peter Burroughs. Davis recalls the approach of a former agent for short actors as akin to “bunching them all together and selling them like fruit.” He and Burroughs wanted to champion people’s individual abilities, rather than the fact that they were short. Together, they lobbied for better pay, relative to each
actor’s skills. “We’ve all got to start somewhere,” says Davis. “I would accept somebody if they had enthusiasm, the desire to be successful, and a love of entertaining.”

As well as advocating tirelessly for other short actors, Davis co-founded the charity Little People UK,. A charity which supports both people with dwarfism and their loved ones. He also started the Reduced Height Theatre Company, inspired in part by the Ovitz family, a family of travelling dwarves and entertainers who survived the horrors of Auschwitz during the Second World War. “What I admired about them was that they didn’t just rely on their height to entertain: they all learned musical instruments, made their own sets, and created plays. One of my dreams is to make either a film or a drama series of their story,” he says.

“Initially, I was thinking, I’m in Star Wars because I’m a little person. I was the right height for the job,” says Davis. “They didn’t understand my performance capability.” At the time, neither did he. “I refer to being a short person as my superpower now. If you embrace your difference, you can find such strength in it. It makes you who you are.”

• See who else received awards at the EE BAFTA Film Awards 2025

Awarded every year by the Academy, the BAFTA Fellowship is the highest accolade given to an individual in recognition of an outstanding and exceptional contribution to film, games or TV. Previous Fellows include Elizabeth Taylor, Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier and Judi Dench.