Fantasy Island actor’s final days dramatized
NEW YORK — Even after shooting a movie with Games of Thrones favourite Peter Dinklage, Jamie Dornan still has no idea what “Dracarys” means.
“What is that?” asks the Fifty Shades of Grey star. “I’ve genuinely never seen the show.” (Hint: It’s the rousing battle cry of Daenerys, Mother of Dragons.)
“See?” Dinklage says with a shrug. “This is what we’re dealing with.”
Fantasy knowledge aside, the wisecracking actors had no trouble becoming fast friends on the set of HBO drama My Dinner with Herve, airing tonight, which tells the true story of French actor Herve Villechaize and British journalist Sacha Gervasi (renamed Danny Tate for the film), who proved to be an unlikely confidante in Villechaize’s final days.
A dwarf and painter-turnedactor who committed suicide at 50 in 1993, Villechaize enjoyed a brush with stardom in the 1970s: first as Scaramanga’s ruthless henchman Nick Nack in the 1974 James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun, and later in Fantasy Island as Tattoo, best remembered for his famous line, “De plane! De plane!” But when the work and money dried up, the hard-partying star became a recluse in his Los Angeles home, where the movie picks up.
Danny (Dornan) is sent to interview Herve (Dinklage) for a presumed puff piece, only to discover a feisty, rueful man who promises he has a bigger story to tell. Through a series of wild, freewheeling interviews, Herve spills his guts to Danny about his sudden rise to fame and even faster fall, as well as his struggles with addiction and relationships.
In their brief time together, “they realized they had so many things that parallelled,” Dornan said. “They were both dealing with very similar things and destructive elements of their characters.”
Dinklage, also a producer of the drama, never considered himself a true fan of Villechaize.
That changed when he met Gervasi, who wrote and directed the movie. They struggled to secure financing for more than a decade until HBO came aboard. The film recreates many events from Gervasi’s week with Villechaize, and includes a scene shot at the same Los Angeles hotel where Gervasi last saw the actor, days before he shot himself.
“It was so surreal, because we were shooting at these real locations where Sacha had met him and the actual bell tower where Herve rings the bell” in Fantasy Island, Dinklage remembers. “Art completely imitated life, and life imitated art. I never had that experience before on anything, and it was really emotional on many occasions.”
Aside from the fact that there are so few little people working in TV and film, “no one else could have played Herve,” Gervasi says. “It couldn’t be more meta: The most famous dwarf on a TV show now playing the most famous dwarf on a show back then. But also, Peter plays it almost as a cautionary tale, like this is how to not handle this kind of attention and acclaim.”