John Rhys Davies, pictured in 2002 (Picture: Reuters)

Welshman John Rhys-Davies is best known for his role as bungling Egyptian Sallah in the Indiana Jones films, but he’s also had major parts in The Living Daylights and King Solomon’s Mines. More recently, he played dwarf Gimli in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. The 1980 television adaptation of James Clavell’s Shogun, in which Rhys-Davies starred, is out now.

How bad was the plane crash you had in 1985?

I went up in a light plane filming King Solomon’s Mines in Africa with a young model called Sharon Stone, who clearly had no future. I was a student pilot myself at the time and was telling the real pilot we wouldn’t be able to take off. We needed 1,200 metres. We had 800. That’s not an insignificant miscalculation. We got two metres off the ground and hit a tree. I looked down and my leg was between a space like that [shows a small gap with hands]. I could smell gas and knew what that meant. I kept thinking: ‘You’re only 46’. It gave me a much better sense of how I should treat death.



Life’s supposed to begin at 40.

I can assure you I started living way before that.

What’s better – TV work or movie work?

Shogun was a mini-series, so even though it went on television, we filmed it like a movie. But both are like burning energy – you just focus it a different way on TV than on a movie. What you can do on stage is even more different. When people are in close proximity, just a dilation of the pupils can impress. If you can consciously dilate your pupils, that is. Which, of course, you can if you’re really good at this job [laughs].


What was the biggest culture shock you found in Japan?

We were filming at sea, and the door swung open and started banging. The director shouted: ‘Shut that door.’ The American carpenter picked up a saw and started sawing a two-by-four. After about ten seconds, he let out a yelp of surprise. As most men know, a saw is designed to cut on the push stroke – when you push, that’s supposed to be the most efficient way of using your weight. Except the Japanese know exactly the opposite. Their saws cut to the pull stroke, because they know the most effective way to cut is with a pull. At that wonderful moment, the gulf between East and West was revealed.

You were in Japan for five months with Shogun. How did you find it?

I didn’t have a Western meal the whole time I was there until we found a McDonald’s on the way home and devoured the food. They were very different people with a very different culture and a very different background. That banal thing: ‘We’re all the same really’ is wrong. We’re not, in terms of culture, a belief in the after-life, even beliefs in what our place in the universe is. It isn’t just the being of men that determines their consciousness; it is sometimes that the consciousness of men determines their being.

How did someone taller than Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom end up playing a dwarf in The Lord Of The Rings?

You couldn’t physically have a natural dwarf doing the fighting or the running in the way that was necessary. My stunt double was a small person, though. There were three of them, and one was a woman.

John Rhys-Davies playing Gimli the dwarf in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Picture: Pierre Vinet/New Line Cinema)

Did you really send one of your doubles along to get the tattoo the cast promised each other they’d receive on completion of TLOR?

Absolutely right. Brett Beattie was his name. You think I’m going to be tattooed by some drunken Maori with a dirty needle? Think again. If I had a bloody tattoo for every film I’d done, I’d be a walking billboard.



Isn’t that just wimping out?

No. I’m a little smarter than most. I did say publicly on television that if The Return Of The King didn’t win Best Picture this year [at the Oscars], I’d have the tattoo wherever they wanted me to have it. But then I’m an Academy member [winks]. Oops, did I say that out loud?

Was yours the heaviest armour on set?

There was, with the costume and the axes, 70lbs there. After donning that little lot, I ran up the hill after Viggo and Orlando. That was an interesting experience. It was the most physically intense film I’ve done.

Was it more intense than Indiana Jones?

Indiana Jones wasn’t physically tough, but they are the only two films I’ve ever been ill on. On The Last Crusade I got sciatica. That’s when the sciatic nerve, which goes through the funny hole in your pelvis down your leg, swells and rubs against the nerves. Painkillers depressed the sensation but they also depressed me. I’m looking forward to the fourth Indy just to show Steven Spielberg I can get through a movie without moaning. I got cholera and nearly died on the set of The Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Is that an exaggeration?

I lost 20lb in two days. There were so many flies that you couldn’t avoid eating them when having dinner. I remember lying in a bed in which I’d excreted and vomited, when there was a knock at the door. In comes our nice Australian lady doctor, looks at me in the eyes and says: ‘Christ, John, have you got it too?’ She ran into my toilet, doubled up. At that point the little flame of hope I had blew out.


Whose stomach dealt with the conditions the best?

Spielberg was the smartest of us all. He arrived with a suitcase full of tinned food, and it was all he ate. He would occasionally join us at the meal, and he’d pick at burnt lamb. We thought him rather prissy. In retrospect, if I ever go back to Tunisia, that’s exactly what I’ll do.

Are we to take it there will be a fourth?

I was talking to Spielberg the other day and he said it was likely I’d be asked this. It depends on the agreement of Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford, and none of those guys are in the business to make a quick buck. They know we have a huge and expectant audience. If we make another one, there has to be a serious prospect that it will be the best of the lot. That means the script has got to be extraordinary. I think it will be made.