John Rhys-Davies: Traveling the Great Circle

Part one

Why did it have to be snakes?” a young girl in an Indiana Jones fedora asked actor John Rhys-Davies following his Sept. 1 panel at Dragoncon. (Photos by Jean Marie Ward unless otherwise noted.)

They say actors work less than six months a year. John Rhys-Davies gives the lie to that cliché. He could easily work 20 months a year or more. Looking at his credits — from Budgie to Raiders of the Lost Ark to Lord of the Rings, on stage and in cartoons too — you might think he already does. Rhys-Davies claims his size, Everyman looks and loud voice put him in a seller’s market, but it could be that people just like to hear him talk. A conversation with Rhys-Davies shuttles easily between Stone Age burials and moon walks, Tolkien and sly meditations on philosophy and history expressly designed to provoke.

At Dragoncon 2001, Rhys-Davies talked to Crescent Blues about his role as Gimli in Lord of the Rings, his 30 years as an actor and his plans for the next hundred years of his life. The performance proved so entertaining and so expansive, Crescent Blues will run the interview in two parts, concluding next week.

Crescent Blues: When you challenged the audience at today’s panel to create a recipe for success, you reminded me of my college philosophy professor.

John Rhys-Davies: Oh, so you hated your philosophy professor too.

How did you get from being a radical student to being a radical teacher?

It’s called growing up isn’t it? I’m not so sure. I suppose it’s radical now but in a slightly different sense. We do not question enough, and all the time, if we’re not careful, we end up just repeating platitudes, just repeating banalities and going with the consensus. Wherever there is a consensus you should be suspicious. It could well be right. Sometimes, all the people are not wrong. But sometimes, all the people can be wrong.

Do you see fiction as a bridge to the future?

I think there is an extraordinary thing that happens in fiction — particularly in science fiction, where in truth, the imagination of the artist arrives before the technology does. I was talking to Harlan Ellison last night, and he said, “I invented the fax.” He mentioned a short story that he had written in which a man is driving his car, and a message comes through the thing onto paper in his car, years before the fax was invented.

The imagination of man sometimes precedes the actual event by hundreds of years. People are very dismissive of Leonardo’s drawings and sketches, saying he got this idea from that guy and the helicopter from this guy. But the synthesis is a great repository that continues to inspire four to five hundred years’ after his time.

I love science fiction.

So you read science fiction yourself; you don’t just act in it.

I do read science fiction. I don’t keep up with it as much as I should, but then you see the volume of other stuff you should keep up with. My old headmaster used to make me cringe, because he used to say you can’t really call yourself educated unless you read at least two books a week outside your subject. By that he meant your subject of special interest or your profession. How many of us can actually master a hundred serious books a year?

They have to be serious?

Deadly serious. Actually, he meant taking the serious stuff along with the light. Then you look back and think, what did I read last year that was actually of any use and value? The odd bits will come — often fiction.

The last novel I read that was just wonderful is by Thomas Keneally, the man who wrote Schindler’s List. It’s an earlier book of his called The Playmaker. The book is set in Australia and based on contemporary historical documents. It tells the story of the first shipload of convicts sent to Australia and how the convicts put on [George] Farquhar’s Recruiting Officer as a play. Amazing sort of incongruity of these guys on short rations — almost starving — with a toehold on this vast, dark continent of Australia, and putting on a comedy about fops. I just thought it a wonderful piece of writing.

Speaking of plays, you mentioned earlier how much you enjoy the energy of performing live. Do you find acting on the stage more rewarding than your film work?

The great secret of life is to get other people to pay for what you would do for free. I would willingly work on stage for free. I would equally do television or film for free. The performance is free; they pay me for the waiting, when they keep me sitting around.

There are times when I bitterly regret not having done more stage work. There are other times when I just like being prepared and walking on to a film set without having made any decisions at all. You walk on the set the first day, and you have a few words with the director, and you talk with the other actor, and you just open yourself and listen. And if you’re listening right, the performance will work out right — assuming the script is well written. The 94 times a day that I am a very bad actor are the times when I have stopped listening.

So, it makes no difference if it’s stage or television or whatever.

Speaking of television, let’s get off on a little tangent. When my assistant editor Teri Smith was researching your career she came up with the credit for “Laughing Spam Fritter”…

[In accent.] Laughing Spam. Lud, dear me. Right, television show called Budgie.

[Returns to normal voice.] Do you remember Adam Faith? A sort of rock-n-roller from England in the ’60s — a very nice man, a very sweet man. Adam created a character called “Budgie” — Budgie Bird — because he talked too much. Budgie was a minor East End villain, who was constantly being manipulated and bullied by Charlie Endell, who was [assumes Endell’s accent] sort of pseudo-Scottish with a slight overlay of posh.

[Back to normal.] Charlie was a sort of villainous mastermind. I was his sidekick and henchman, Laughing Spam Fritter. [Resumes East End accent.] Laughing S. had to discipline Budgie from time to time, make sure he didn’t step over the mark, you know. You know? You con my con? You know wha’ I mean? You get my drift, right? ‘Cause sometimes, you gotta draw a line. You know wha’ I mean? Sometimes, you gotta enforce a bit of discipline. Sometimes, you gotta take a ‘ammer to a guys knees. Sometimes, you gotta make all their trousers ‘ave to be shortened to the knees. Know wha’ I mean? Be nothing personal, mind. It’s in the line of duty, in it?

Who played Charlie Endell?

Iain Cuthbertson. He died a few years ago, alas, and what a great loss he was. His finest performance was in Armstrong’s Last Goodnight, which was a fine West End play by John Arden.

Johnny Armstrong was a sort of a [Scottish accent again] piratical and trouble-making Highlander, and a big, burly pirate of a man. The king sent up one of his mistresses to deal with him, and this woman ran him ’round her little finger. In one of the great exchanges between them, where he, baffled by the quickness of her mind, he says [in accent], “You’re a whore.”

“Aye, but I’m not yours.”

Wonderful, wonderful actor.

And Adam [Faith] — lovely man, sweet man. Haven’t seen him for about four or five years. He came and had dinner with me once in Los Angeles a few years ago. His career had been on the up-and-up, and he had a few downs and a few ups and a few downs, but I would imagine he’s on the up again, because our life is like that, you know.

Yours seems to be…

On a desperate, spiraling, spiraling trajectory that pilots know as a flat spin. A flat spin is one that you can’t get out of. The aeroplane is so dynamically balanced that you can’t put any forward forces to get the nose down to be able to accelerate and dive out of it. It’s a dead man’s spin.

But you intend to keep it spinning for another hundred years at least.

Oh, you listened to my theory today about us living to be a hundred and fifty. You, I would say, would almost certainly make it. I’m marginal, because I know what I’m looking for. I think that I might just make it. Do you have children?

Not yet.

They will make it. The technology is falling into place quite sharply. The odds are we will be able to grow new lungs and things like that. We actually will be able to deal with tumors. You will go to your doctor, and when he says the terrible words, “You’ve got cancer,” you will go: “Oh, damn, that’s really inconvenient for that holiday I was going to take. My breast has to be removed? OK, we can do that immediately. I guess I’ll have to wear a falsie for at least six or eight months until we can grow a new breast and graft it into position.”

It will be your own skin. The organ will function as well as the original. There will be no taking drugs to suppress the immune response. I think your greatest fear will be an accident…and of course, murder.

There’s always that.

Yes, indeed, and it’s very interesting, because of our social responses. We will, I think, become more cautious in certain ways, and at the same time, I think we will be very hostile towards those that take life and damage life irretrievably.

I can easily see the regeneration of soft tissue organs. They’ve already done that in certain places. It’s not really an issue. I see the problem as maintenance of the brain tissue with its memories.

There’s a drug that Allen Pharmaceuticals are in trials with at the moment. They claim it will act like a vaccine against amaloid plaques in your brain. They allege these amaloid plaques are the actual cause of Alzheimers Disease and similar conditions.

I did, however, read a disconcerting observation the other day that beta amaloid has a positive role to play in the body and in the brain. It might well be that by destroying these darn things, we’re not necessarily doing ourselves any good after all.

These are early days, but I’m pretty darn sure that the more we know, the likelihood is that we will be able to vaccinate against things like Alzheimers.

That would be a thrilling thought, because having very elderly parents…

How old are they?

My father’s 87 going on 93. My mother’s 85 going on 64. I see the difference between them is partially physical, but it is largely mental.

I think part of the problem is that men don’t keep quite as physically active as women do. Women do things around the house all the time. My mother at 86, was still cooking dinner for me whenever I got home. Whereas my father, after retirement, did less and less. Actually, he was encouraged to do less and less by my mother who wanted him tidy and well-behaved in many ways. He was allowed to sort of vegetate and rot. That’s partly it.

The other thing is that Alzheimer and the problems of extreme old age are problems that we’ve only recently developed in human history. Were you there when I was talking about Stone Age burials?

The thesis was that if you look at Stone Age burials you will find male skeletons in their thirties, forties, fifties and, occasionally, in their sixties. You never find a female skeleton over the age of 30. The average age seems to be around 21, 22 for females. Childbirth is the great eliminator. So it’s really very rare that the consequences of aging ever have to be faced. Once you take away the perils of childbirth, women have an evolutionary advantage over men.

Out of curiosity, what did you study in university?

I read English and history with a little, tiny bit of philosophy, and I too had a philosophy professor, who I loathed. Actually, the more I got to know him, the more I understood his torment. He was a fascinating man.

There’s a book by a man called Ved Mehta, an Indian intellectual who interviewed a number of English intellectuals in the early Sixties. It’s called The Fly and the Fly-Bottle. In it, Mehta talks about the young philosophers at Oxford under the influence of this man called Gale Austin who wrote a book called How to Do Things with Words.

Uh oh. That’s dangerous.

God, yes. Austin was an analytical philosopher. I remember the paragraph. It said, “While Austin was alive, many of the younger Oxford philosophers found it impossible to compose a paragraph, because after they had done so, they heard Gale Austin’s dry voice taking it apart piece by piece.”

[Davies’ philosophy professor] was tall. He was, clearly, at one point, a very handsome man. He’d gone up to Oxford before the war. He got a First in Part Ones. He was the captain of a tank regiment in the Western Desert and fought with distinction with the Guards. After the war, he went back and took a starred First in the Tri-Parts and was elected to a fellowship at Baillol. Went to Harvard, got an M.S.C. in mathematical logic, came back again to Oxford and settled down, married a smart woman and then did nothing.

He was always writing this definitive work on mathematical logic. In the end, he became known as his wife’s husband, rather than as a man in his own right. He was always drinking far too much. He was constantly saying, “Oh, God, I left my manuscript in Oxford. I’ve got to go back this weekend and pick it up there…. Oh, God, I couldn’t find my manuscript in Oxford. I must have left it down in London. I’ll have to go down to London this weekend and pick it up there.”

He was constantly being arrested by the police for driving drunk. (They were a bit more tolerant in those days.) In the end, he died as an old alcoholic. But he and I engaged in a sort of headlong…over one of the girl students, actually. But I certainly got up his nose, and I perfectly understand why.

But he had a wonderful trick in lecturing that I’ve longed to put in a piece. He would light a cigarette, and he would walk to one side of the room where there was an ashtray. He would light his cigarette. He would drop his ash in the ashtray, and he would go to the blackboard and write “Descartes and such and such a thing.” Then he would walk over to the far end of the room where there was another ashtray, and he would put the cigarette down. Then he would walk back to the blackboard, write again on the blackboard and walk over to the first ashtray and light another cigarette. Then he would commute between the two cigarettes. Such a wonderful piece of business! I’ve longed to put it into something.

He was a sad man, one of those men whose glory days really had been between 19 and 24. Hugely intelligent. I think the report to the Tri-Parts was that they had not awarded a higher mark since 1919. I guess, in truth, he was one of those individuals whose critical intelligence was so well-developed that there was nothing he could think of that he could not find a fault in. And he despaired of finding anything he could not find fault in. Although any form of creativity demands self-criticism, if your critical and creative abilities are exactly matched, you can’t do a thing.

That’s one of the reasons editors seldom write, although many of them are more proficient than the writers they edit. They look at their own efforts and say, “Well, it’s not as good as the person I edited yesterday. The thought isn’t there. The heart isn’t there. Besides, I really don’t have anything new to say on the subject. OK, I’ll withdraw it.”

Really? The heartbreaking thing is, particularly for the young… I don’t know about you, but I was very self-competitive. I was a very unhappy teenager. I had to be the best at whatever I chose to do. But when you come up against increasingly bright, increasingly able and harder working people than you, at some point, the mind revolts. You say: “Well, damn. Screw that. I’m not really interested in it anyway. I’m not going to read the books for this term. I’m far more interested in reading the entire works of Thomas Nash.” Because you can’t face being judged, and that is the real act of cowardice.

You’ve obviously overcome the fear of being judged any extreme self-criticism in terms of your performances. Or have you?

Well, most of it. Acting is pretty schizophrenic in so many ways, and there’s no point in being majorly upset over something that is peripheral and insignificant. On the other hand, you should have certain standards, and you should try to keep them up. You should not try to phone in the performance, for example — though I suspect that all of us do if we stick around long enough.

But there are still times where one is in touch with the lion. Sometimes you just get up there, and you do it. You’re listening, and it happens, and you know that you’ve still got it. You know you’ve got a whole forest of lions in there, and they ain’t tame.

What do you do to escape from the lions? What do you do to unwind from your constant schedule? It seems like you work at least 300 days a year.

I could work 700 days a year if I really chose to. I used to think that was a direct result of my genius. In truth — and it is, really, the truth — if you are tall, fat and ugly, and you have a loud voice, you’re in a seller’s market. There aren’t that many fat old men around.

But how does one cut off? I don’t have difficulty sleeping. Since I’ve been a grown-up, and since I’ve actually made peace with my soul — I seldom have disturbed sleep. There can be a war going on around me, and I can still go to bed and sleep. I mean that literally.

In Bosnia, for example?

Yes, indeed. Damn him. [Referring to his second and youngest son, who worked as a combat photographer in Bosnia.] I was in Zagreb, watching people scurry and jets flying low over the city and wondering when was the director going to say cut?

But there are things that are important — how we teach our children to cope with the really tough decisions in life. How we singularly fail to deal with them ourselves, most of the time. How we live with compromise.

When you’re a Byronic teenager, the word “compromise” actually brings a phlegm up in your throat, the spittle just… In fact, as you, I think, grow up, you understand — what’s that wonderful line? “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.” I think the only thing that keeps the desperation at bay is the ability to sacrifice a certain principle, a certain possession, and hold on to what you regard as fundamental. And to resist the impulse toward martyrdom. [Laughs.]

[Joins in laughter.] Resisting the impulse to martyrdom is always important. What do you consider fundamental?

[Long, profound sigh.] Things like trying to balance desire against love. Things like not abandoning the really painful positions when that’s exactly what you want to do. Standing and fighting. Sifting through the sort of sorry, shabby compromises that you must make in this life to find the little bit of hard ground under your feet, then skipping from that rock to the next.

You have an obligation to show your children that you must not let a tragedy screw up their lives. At the same time, you have to show that there is real responsibility and you have to face it. And you always get that balance wrong. But that said, I’m pretty damn proud of my sons, and they are at least fairly understanding of me as they grow older.

For myself, traveling in the great circle of life, I find that I loathe the cliches that I once endorsed. The government is bad. Big business is bad. Soldiers — the military is always bad. These are the constant cliches of television and modern entertainment. And these cliches are generally peddled by the sons of millionaire ex-communists, who can afford their comfortable, unthinking liberalism without any sort of glimmer of conscience. I think the world is more complicated and interesting because of it.

That would’ve been a very radical position for you to take when you were in school if, as I understand it, you attended university in the ’60s

Indeed so. I also became very aware of the fact of how our moods and thoughts were being very carefully created and manipulated. When you’re young and radical, you’re sort of vaguely aware of that in the back of your mind, but you think it’s OK, because their heart’s in the right place.

In the end, when you look at the chaos and mess that resulted from the causes you supported… It’s impossible to think now that Vietnam is truly any better off under the Communists than they would’ve been under the status quo. And the cost of human life in other places is just unconscionable. One should never have tolerated it — or thought about it. Damn it, sometimes, those wise old men really were wise old men, and iconoclasm is not necessarily always in the best interest of mankind.

This gets back to the whole notion of the importance of heroes.

Yes, it does.

Who do you consider the fictional and real-life heroes of the last quarter century? Or is it too soon to tell?

There’s a great story about Chou En Lai, was basically foreign minister of China for forty years. In 1989 [the bicentennial of the French Revolution], someone asked him what he considered to be the significance of the French Revolution. Chou En Lai paused for a second and said, “It’s too soon to tell.” But that’s a different historical perspective.

Star Trek — I’m sure that there are already astronauts who became astronauts as a result of that show.

There are.

They’re all Trekkies at heart, basically. And just think of the values [Gene] Roddenberry was embracing. Those were real high-end ideals. You had duties to the crew. You had duties to Earth, but you also had duties to life wherever it existed, and that you should respect other ways of doing things. That tolerance did not necessarily mean absolute acceptance of the intolerable. There is always a conflict between principle and the actual practice of principle.

I know that one of these days there’s going to be a space cadet corps. They’ll be looking at some of these old shows, and they’ll laugh their heads off. But some of it will stick, because really, in our heart of hearts, we are a wonderful and destructive species. But we are aware of the fact that we have murderous and dangerous impulses. We also have pretty noble desires and interests as well.

I’m basically a monarchist and a Welshman, and my fealty is sworn to my prince and his ma’am, but I love this country. I mean real America, not bloody New York or bloody L.A., but the real, great, good, golden heart of it is so sound. It really is the last, best hope of mankind in so many ways. The crassness I used to abhor when I was a very sophisticated teenager I see now as that great virtue of actually knowing what you can be. I don’t care if your beliefs are different from mine, but having the courage to see them through, stand and be counted, and be tolerant up to the point where it gets semi-ridiculous and then make a stand. I think these are virtues that frequently Europe has forgotten, but America, God bless it, still keeps in its heart.

To get back to the real question now: who are the heroes? Who are the heroes?

Who do you consider a hero? What names spring to your mind when you think of the word “hero?”

Oh, Buzz Aldrin. I mean, those guys were so bloody cool. Nowadays, CNN doesn’t even tell you who the astronauts are that have gone up. They aren’t giving their names anymore. And to a certain extent NASA has lost its real driving goals and ambitions. I still can’t get over it. I can still hear [John F.] Kennedy making that speech: “We’ll put a man on the moon in the next ten years.” And fight a major war. And hold the continent of Europe ready against…

The smaller nations whose bright and articulate politicians complain about the unilateralism of America have really no idea just how enormously strong and powerful America is. That is not to say I will not criticize America. I think some of those bloody wars that were fought in the Balkans were started to distract from internal politics, and I don’t necessarily believe there was any sense or history in them. You should’ve stopped Milosovic very early on, about the time Slovenia and Croatia were breaking away. But to then intervene unilaterally in a civil war — it completely abrogates the point of N.A.T.O.

Oh, I’m so off the point, aren’t I?

Not really, the subject of war and heroes makes a great segue to Lord of the Rings. Did you choose Gimli or did Gimli choose you?

[Laughs.] I wanted to be Barliman Butterbur. I wanted to go to New Zealand (a country I’d never worked in before) spend maybe two, three, four or five weeks, maybe a couple of months, on the film, have a jolly nice time and get back and get on with other things.

In fact when I was offered Gimli by my agent, I said, “You’re joking. I’m not going to spend six hours a day in make-up….”

Jean Marie Ward and Teri Smith

Click here to learn more about John Rhys-Davies and The Fellowship of the Ring, episode one of Lord of the Rings.

Readers Respond

Regarding Iain Cuthbertson,
I’d just like to point out that John Rhys-Davis is wrong in saying that Iain Cuthbertson is dead. Iain is alive, well and living quietly in Scotland — he will be 74 on 4th January 2004.

Mary Cuthbertson