JOHN RHYS-DAVIES

The shy raconteur

An interview with John Rhys-Davies cannot really be described as an interview with John Rhys-Davies. It’s more like having an audience with John Rhys-Davies.

Supping on a coffee on the front deck of his home in Glen Murray that overlooks the murky waters of Lake Whangape, the actor who played Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings movies is joyfully waxing eloquent and profuse on all things theatrical, as one of several luminaries of the stage and screen lending their support to an initiative to get the new Waikato Regional Theatre opening completely debt-free in about April 2024.

It may come as a surprise to some that the star behind Gimli and Indiana Jones’ ally Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark – among many other roles – is a big fan of Hamilton. His daughter attends school in Cambridge and, now firmly ensconced in his rural locale, he spends a lot of time in ‘‘the capital of the Waikato and the future capital of New Zealand’’.

A few prompting questions set the wheels in motion and Rhys-Davies is quickly delivering a spiel that could easily be mistaken for a well-rehearsed onstage soliloquy. ‘‘Why do we need a theatre? Well, because all great cities create and build culture. And you cannot have a culture without a theatre. Whether it’s for music, or for professional plays, for amateur plays, or for just bringing people in and seeing the magic of live theatre. I think it’s a marvellous thing.’’

The new theatre would be a very important facility for the education of the region’s younger citizens, he says. ‘‘Everyone should be prepared to get up and speak to an audience. It should be part of our education. And that’s one of the great benefits of learning drama in school. When I talk to young people, I try to emphasise a cure for the real problem. The problem is shyness.

‘‘Actually, we are all shy. I covered my shyness as a young boy with bravado. With public defiance. With all of those things ... ‘‘What is shyness? Shyness is the belief that when you enter a room full of strangers, or people you don’t know, that they are all looking at you and judging you.

‘‘But that room full of strangers is also a room full of shy people who are thinking that you are judging them. So seize on that, and assume that whenever you are in the company of strangers that they are all shy.

‘‘Once you have made people feel at ease you can do almost anything. It’s so important that we teach children to do this. And one of the ways [we do that] is . . . having to play at being another person. Sometimes it’s easier to speak other people’s words than our own, because we have not yet got the vocabulary or the experience.’’

And what have been the most memorable or vital of these other people’s words that he has spoken? ‘‘The most filled with life? I would think Gimli. Probably Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But there were one or two others along the line. Some of them never got out.’’

One of these was a grizzly bear-themed film in the mid 1980s called Predator. ‘‘That never got out. It was catastrophic ... the whole thing folded and bills were left. The producer ended up going to prison. I played a character in that who I thought was great fun ...’’

The ensuing, wide-ranging conversation is a series of anecdotes about actors, with one of the greatest being, in Rhys-Davies’ estimation, Peter O’Toole. ‘‘I still have a pair of Peter O’Toole’s socks [that he loaned me] . . . Peter had it all. He had the voice. He had the intelligence. Real intelligence. Actors can get by with actors’ intelligence, but not all good actors have real intelligence. And he was the best raconteur I ever knew.’’

Rhys-Davies, who recently turned 78, isn’t a half-bad raconteur himself. Given that much of his acting oeuvre is in the field of fantasy and science fiction, much of his raconteuring takes place on stage at conventions like Armageddon Expo. ‘‘The fans have had the biggest effect on me,’’ he says. ‘‘If I have changed, I hope I have changed slightly for the better. And if I have, it is because of going to fan conventions.’’

His enthusiasm for such enthusiasts was somewhat lacking in the early days. ‘‘The first fan convention I went to I got told: ‘You gotta come. You gotta promote the show’ and all that sort of thing. Oh god, what the hell do I want to do this sort of thing for? All these people dressed up as Captain Kirk or something like that. Why can’t they get a proper life?

‘‘And I went, and slowly I realised that they do have a real life. And some of those lives are immensely rich. And you meet real heroes.

‘‘You meet the tired, exhausted mid-40s woman who has brought up and devoted her life to a child who cannot speak . . . You meet proud fathers who bring along a little boy who is blind. And you see him listen and use his imagination as you talk. You can see him picturing in his mind these things.’’

Rhys-Davies says his own imagination was fired up when he got his first taste of acting and theatre in the mid-1950s. ‘‘My parents left England and went out to Africa, and so from 4 to 9 I grew up in Africa. I was a wild colonial boy.’’ By the time he turned 10, he was ‘‘dispatched to a minor boarding school in England, to which I have never really confessed my real indebtedness: Truro School’’.

‘‘Cornwall in those days had no local theatres ... Very few touring companies came down to Cornwall – so the Truro School play was a cultural event. We did about eight performances and filled the school hall for the best part of a week. In those days it took its drama seriously.’’

He recalls first seeing Oedipus Rex as a boy of about 11. ‘‘And I suddenly realised that my destiny – because, of course, we all have a destiny – my destiny was to be the greatest living playwright.’’

And at this point he erupts with laughter. ‘‘Well, I may have been slightly deflected, but I’m working at it! I’m working at it! I’m still a work in progress.

‘‘So they put me in a play and found I was good. And then I discovered Shakespeare. So I did Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. I did Othello. And in Shakespeare I found the language with which to express my adolescent rage. So since I decided I was going to be the world’s greatest playwright, I obviously had to read English. I was hoping to do it at Cambridge, actually, but ... I got rather drunk instead and failed the interview rather dismally.’’

Instead he went to the then-new University of East Anglia, helped form a dramatic society (‘‘I cornered all the best parts for myself for a year or two’’), got some roles in local theatre, and then won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada). ‘‘I had seven weeks out of work in the first five years – and that was only because I hated pantomimes.

‘‘I’m delighted to say that I’m still learning,’’ he says, referring not just to his acting career. ‘‘It’s such fun. It doesn’t matter what the subject is.

‘‘There are days that go by, if you are not careful, days when you don’t hear anything new. And that’s why you have to read things like the Times Literary Supplement. Or New Scientist. And, of course, the Waikato Times

. . . Any paper called the Times.’’

‘‘Once you have made people feel at ease you can do almost anything. It’s so important that we teach children to do this.’’