By Nancy M [Loremaster Subscriber]
“An actor discovers, in the course of his life, and the course of his career, that some parts move people and have bound people together, father and son, and brothers and sisters as well.”
That was John Rhys-Davies’ response to a Fan Expo Toronto 2024 audience member’s question of whether there was a role throughout his career that he was most proud of.
“These parts, like [Gimli in] The Lord of the Rings, are hugely important to many members of the audience, and you are humbled by that. When you discover that.”
A follow-up question rather delighted the 80-year-old Welsh actor: “How does it feel to be the gold standard for how Dwarves are portrayed now?”
“You’re quite right, of course. As Dwarves go, I think I have to say that Gimli – well, you know The Lord the Rings actually – was the story of a Dwarf, really, and saving civilization as we know it.”
“Gimli is wonderful, and in a way, he is gold because he is more than Tolkien realized. Tolkien would have called Sam the touchstone of the piece, the common man. The snag is, that most of those other characters are really rather idealized. Gimli is us. And he is a wonderful example of what we aspire to be. Especially brave.”
“The character is actually the most human character in the whole thing. He has all our failings. The hostility, the aggression, the xenophobia, the suspicion, the distrust. He also has the qualities that we hope that we have. The capacity to protect those that need protection. Loyalty. Friendship. And the greatest one of all, the capacity to change.”
When asked if he would have liked to be any other character in the trilogy, he replied, “Well, I guess Galadriel is out. Actors can fall in love with their characters, so I can’t really imagine there being as fun a character as there was Gimli.”
These comments contrast with his earlier description of his trepidation about joining the Lord of the Rings production.
“I knew it couldn’t work. I tried to read Lord the Rings, and it didn’t work for me at all. My elder son, he came home from school, and read the whole thing in five days. My younger son and I would fall asleep trying to read this incredibly difficult book. So, you can imagine when I finally got the part, and committed, well I didn’t really commit.”
“It’s going to be a calamity. They may not even finish the first one, and anyway it will go direct to video.”
“Who ever heard of films being made in New Zealand? This is a film that is going to require the skills and resources you can only find in Hollywood, possibly Vancouver these days and Toronto, of course. Rome or Paris. There was no tradition really of making big films in New Zealand. Added to which, you can’t turn Lord of the Rings into a film.”
“Look at what happens. Everything is lovely and then something odd happens. And then something odder happens. And then something sinister happens. And then something worse happens. And then, actually, things look very unpleasant, and there’s a little fight. And then there’s a skirmish. And then there’s a war, basically. And then things get bleak; It’s that sort of curve.”
“Nobody wanted to play Gimli. You spend your entire life trying to be recognized, and then you are going to spend three years covered in prosthetics? “I said to my manager: I’m not going to do this. The makeup alone will take hours. She said, ‘Don’t worry, John, they said they can get it down to an hour.’ I said bullshit. You cannot do that in an hour and make it look like a Dwarf.”
“What actor would want to do that? Not this one.”
“My son clinched it. Well, two people. My then agent, who is still my manager now, said look John, if you really don’t want to play this part, I don’t think we can continue to represent you.’”
“And my number one son said, ‘Dad, if you turn this down, I think you’re nuts.’ And I said why? He said, ‘Think of the families.’” Rhys-Davies spread his arms wide as he continued recounting the conversation. “’In every book shop in the entire world there’s that much book space devoted to Tolkien. Think of what that means in terms of the families. And I thought alright.”
“But I still wasn’t convinced. So, I went [to New Zealand]. I said I would do it. So, I made it my business to go to every department. I spent a morning or an afternoon in every department. And my heart sank. Because in every one of those departments there was a level of excellence and quality and enthusiasm, a passion for what they were doing that I had never seen anywhere in the world before. They weren’t blasé about being filmmakers. They were just passionate about making it.”
“And that really pissed me off.”
“The plan was, basically, convince myself that this is not going to work. Go to Peter Jackson and say look Peter, as you know, I’ve got a very ill wife, and I’ve reconsidered, and I don’t think I have the time to do this. And he would have had to let me go. Why? Because when you’re doing a project like that everyone has to march in the direction of the dance, to the beat of the drum, and you all must work together.”
“But before that, I went to watch this little man in shorts. They should have modelled Gimli on him. I watched him direct. And not only did he handle his actors superbly, but every crew member that came up to him and asked him a question got an answer, easily, straightforwardly. I realized I was in the presence of one of the most remarkable directors that I’d ever met. And then I said okay, let’s have a go.”
Earlier in the session, Rhys-Davies was asked how he originally felt about Peter Jackson, who at that point had only directed smaller films, taking on the Lord of the Rings franchise.
“It was quite clear Peter Jackson was a talented, small movie maker. Anyone can make a good movie in six weeks with four characters and a decent script. You can do it. You all can do that.”
“It’s different when you’ve got 21 leading characters. And sometimes extras, 1,200 to 1,500 extras, with horses. And you’re shooting over a three-year period basically, though we tried to compress it into 15 months originally. That was the lie that was told to us by the studio. And cleverly what he did was, he shot parts of each episode right from the beginning so by the time he got the first one made, [the studio] dug deep in their pockets to finish off the others.”
“Jackson’s genius makes him one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.”
“I can not emphasize to you the impact Peter Jackson has had on New Zealand. When we went there, tourism was worth 1.3 billion dollars a year. The last time I looked, just before Covid, it was either 14 or 17 billion a year. Peter Jackson put New Zealand on the map of the world more significantly than anyone since Peter Cook.”
He’s a great New Zealander and he created a film industry. And he produced Lord of the Rings, which I believe is an abiding masterpiece.
To the laughter of the capacity crowd, Rhys-Davies humbly explained that he was the first person to “realize what we had.”
“We had a press conference about four weeks into shooting, and the press were there. Everyone was very cynical and very skeptical. I got up and I said: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press, please revise your expectations upwards.”
“[I had] three predictions. Firstly, this film is going to be bigger than the new Star Wars.” Rhys-Davies then imitated Peter Jackson’s physical reaction to his boast by crouching and covering his head with his hands.
“Second, when these films come out, they’re going to be one of the biggest grossers of their time.”
“And thirdly, in 20 years time, and you look back, you will realize that these are some of the finest films that have ever been made.”
“Eighteen months later, Peter came to me and said, you know when you said we were going to be bigger than the new Star Wars? We just out grossed them.”
Another audience member asked if there is a role that still haunts him. “I still don’t know how to play Treebeard. I never got Treebeard right, I’m afraid. You can’t burden yourself with failures.”
I can assure you that the audience very strongly did not agree with his assessment of his Treebeard interpretation!
My own beautiful daughter Olivia, dressed as the Hobbit Merry, asked Rhys-Davies about his challenges with the prosthetic makeup.
“I didn’t have an allergy. We were using medical adhesive, which is hypo allergenic. The snag is that it bonds to the surface of the skin. And you must take it off daily, and when you do, you take a layer skin with you. So, I ended up taking a layer of skin off all around my eyes. And then of course the body has a histamine response, so it gets enlarged and swollen.”
“I had a girlfriend at the time, and she looks at me and says, ‘Honey, I don’t know how to say this, but I can’t bear to look at you.’”
What was his favorite filming location?
“Every location we found in New Zealand was just spectacular. But there was one down on South Island – I’ve never seen anything like it. It was the Edoras sequence. When we got off the bus after having a three-hour drive, we just looked around and said no one will believe this. They will think that this is a painted set.”
When asked for his favorite scene of the trilogy, he picked the Council of Elrond: “I was there. I hit The Ring with an axe.”
When asked if he had any advice for budding filmmakers, he said to watch the extended appendices of the Lord of the Rings movies. “It will serve you better than any film school.”
He talked about the accents accorded to each race of Middle Earth: “We knew that the Elves sound vaguely Welsh because that’s what Tolkien intended. And we knew that the Hobbits had to be west country Britain – Bristol, Somerset, perhaps Devon.”
So where to put Gimli? “Well, I could have been another Irish dwarf…a little leprechaun. But I wanted to get away from that. I want to give him a little bit of a Scottish edge. More guttural, back in the throat, with real fire.”
“Certainty of death! Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?” Rhys-Davies said in a familiar Scottish accent to screams of delight from the crowd.
And then it was over. The last person in line had their question answered because the man who brought a wonderful character to life insisted no one would leave disappointed.
“What a wonderful audience. What a wonderful country. What a wonderful nation. What a wonderful people. Now go home and get some sleep.”