Patrick Cremona talks to Warwick Davis about his career and some of his most recent projects, including the news that 1988 dark fantasy film Willow is getting a follow-up series on Disney+.
Throughout his incredible career, Warwick Davis has appeared in some of the biggest film franchises of all time. Since making his screen debut as Wicket W. Warrick in Return of the Jedi, he’s appeared in various roles in numerous Star Wars films, was a cast member in all eight Harry Potter movies and has fronted several films in the Leprechaun series.
For many fans though, his most defining role remains playing the titular character in Ron Howard’s 1988 dark fantasy film Willow, and so when news of a sequel series on Disney+ was announced last month it was greeted with tremendous enthusiasm from some quarters. For Davis, though, his main reaction to the announcement was one of relief – he’d known about the series for over two years, and had been desperate to tell people for a long time.
“You know what, it’s weird to be able to talk about it now!” he tells RadioTimes.com from his home studio a few weeks after the news broke. “It’s something which I never thought I would see happen.”
Davis said that while he’d hoped to do a sequel for some time, the eventual genesis of the project was rather fortuitous. “Everything sort of aligned when we did the movie Solo,” he explains. “The writer John Kasdan was a huge fan of Willow, he grew up watching it and it’s one of the things that inspired him to become a screenwriter, as well as his Dad (The Empire Strikes Back co-writer Lawrence Kasdan).
“And then Ron Howard came into direct and John mentioned to him that he was a big fan of Willow and that got them talking. And I was on Solo looking a little bit like Willow with my long hair as Weazel, and all these things came together. We took it to Disney+ and they were as excited as we were about it and greenlit the series.”
Production is slated to start on the project next year, and despite more than 30 years having passed since he last played the character, Davis isn’t too concerned about reprising the role – “it’s just like riding a bike”, he claims. That’s not to say he isn’t expecting any challenges: he acknowledges that there will be extra physical challenges now that he’s older, for example, but mainly he’s just excited to see where the character goes.
“I’m hoping that we establish Willow as a very accomplished sorcerer now,” he says. “I hope he’s been practicing and we get to see him do some real magic, which would be fabulous. And also I’m hoping that we can reunite with Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley as well!”
Delayed sequels to iconic films and TV shows from previous decades have been all the rage in recent years, and Davis puts that down to the comfort that can be found in nostalgia. And he says that the most important thing when it comes to revisiting classics like this is staying true to the spirit of the original, something which he’s confident will be the case on Willow. “I think you’ve got to acknowledge the spirit, and, especially with something like Willow, the humour,” he says. “Because you forget that the movie had a lot of humour in it so it’s important that the series has that humour and doesn’t take itself too seriously.”
He’s also looking forward to seeing how the series can take advantage of the significant technological developments that have been made since the original film was shot. Davis says he’s been reading up on some of the methods used to film The Mandalorian, where sets have often been fully replaced by digital screens, and he wonders if similar methods might be used for Willow. “It’s amazing what you can achieve now,” he says. “If someone is writing a script it can now be put on the screen exactly as it’s written. It didn’t use to be like that, you used to have to edit the script a bit to make it possible, but now anything’s possible.”
While it might be the headline grabber for now, Willow is far from the only project Davis has in the pipeline. He’s managed to keep himself extremely busy in this difficult year, in no small part due to making a move into what is a relatively new arena for him: voice acting. It’s something that he’d been hoping to try his hand at for some time, and he’s fortunate in that his various voice projects haven’t been curtailed at all by the pandemic.
“I sit in my booth here and record, which is really lovely because it’s exactly the same as being in London,” he explains. “You wouldn’t even know the recordings were being done at home! I speak with the director via Zoom and they can hear me in the studio directly so it works really well.”
Read the interview in full here.
