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Starburst: Paranoid Mettle

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Warwick Davis talks about the physically demanding challenges of his role as Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

One of the most complex collaborations in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is Marvin the Paranoid Android. The melancholy robot was designed by director Garth Jennings and the film's art department, built by the team at Jim Henson's Creature Shop, played by actor Warwick Davis and re-voiced in post-production by Alan Rickman.

"It was, without a doubt, the most physically demanding role I've ever had," claims Davis, who took on the arduous job of working inside the cumbersome Marvin suit every day. "Although Peter Elliott, our movement director, had lots of advice from a physical point of view, it was really just a matter of being sensible. I bought myself those elastic strengthening things that an athlete would wear to put around your knees, and I also had one of those big belts to support my back. That really helped to take the weight of the whole thing. When you're a short person in a big world, you find yourself having to be fairly athletic just getting in and out of a car. It poses those sorts of athletic issues, so I'm fairly fit in that regard, which was to my advantage. But I lost quite a bit of weight in doing it.

"The costume actually weighed about four stone and I weigh six stone, so it was nearly as heavy as I was. We only found that out because they had to weigh me with the costume for Marvin's lift in the Heart of Gold set. So I remember seeing Paul [Dunn, the special FX chief]'s face when I was told it was ten stone."

Davis first heard about the Hitchhiker's project from Henson project supervisor Jamie Courtier, who got in touch with Willow Management, an agency for actors of unusual size that Davis runs with his father-in-law. "They were talking about Marvin as a man in a suit, but weren't sure if it was going to work, so they asked us to come down to the workshop and talk about it. So we went down there and saw the early designs they had done for Marvin and the little maquette they had don, and I came up with various scenarios for how you could have somebody extremely short, whose head would be inside Marvin's chest. The head would be some sort of mechanical, remote-controlled type of thing on top, because the neck looked very thin, and it would have been almost impossible to have somebody inside it.

"So that didn't sem to work, and during the converstion, Jamie listened politely and then got around fairly swiftly to, 'Can we just take a picture of you, Warwick?' He sat there with a Mac and superimposed me over the photograph of the model and said, 'Look, you would fit! Would you fancy going along and we'll build the prototype and see if it's going to work?' I said yes, so that's what we did."

Although Courtier's team did their best to keep the weight down to an absolute minimum, Davis was only able to work in the Marvin suit for limited periods of time. "The whole costume would take about 20 minutes or so to put on," he explains. "I could basically rehearse in the body without the arms if I wanted, but I mostly rehearsed in the body with the arms and finally the head. That's really when it became unbearably heavy, was once the head was on, so I could only work for maybe 10 minutes in the head. It would get really hot and because of the weight, it would need to come off after that. So we'd be really prepared and have the video camera running to record and I'd run the scene a few times and then we'd sit back and have a look at it and make adjustments and do it again after I had a break. Once shooting came, I was in it a lot longer, so I would sit down and be there in the head and standing by.

"It was actually quite peaceful, because when you're in there, I would chat to my technician over the radio because I could see everything going on through my monitors, but I was kind of in my own little world a little bit. Even with all the hubbub going on around me, I could sit there and maybe have a little nap sometimes without anyone knowing and wake up to the word 'Action,' which was quite frightening sometimes, but nobody ever knew I was having a doze."

Needless to say, Davis had a much harder time playing Marvin than Alan Rickman, who ultimately provided the character's voice. "The luxury of it for him is he doesn't know what I went through. But we're friends, and we actually share an agent as well, so it's all quite close in that regard. He was actually slightly unsettled by the fact that he had been asked to do this and wanted to make sure that he had my blessing before he went in and did it, which I thought was very gentlemanly. I don't believe there are many actors that would consider that.

"Now I look at it and Marvin really is a team effort between Alan, myself and the technicians that built the suit and maintained it on a daily basis. It's a character that has to be played by more than one person in the end, so I was kind of flattered by that."

While it's too early to know how successful Hitchhiker's will be, Davis believes the film has tremendous box office potential. "I hope that the film is received and understood the way it should be," he muses. "It's one of those pieces that the audience could take the wrong way and not quite get it, but I hope they do get it and understand it. I'd like it to sit alongside Star Wars. I'm not saying it's going to be a huge phenomenon like Star Wars, but I should hope that it would be something that when people talk about Star Wars, they would also maybe bring up Hitchhiker's in the same sentence, because I certainly think it has its merits. It's exactly my sort of movie as well."

Sci-Fi Star

The original Marvin alongside Arthur Dent (Simon Jones

Davis is no stranger to genre work, having appeared in countless SF and Fantasy projects, from his starring role in Willow, to his appearance as Professor Flitwick in the upcoming Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. "For anybody to be an actor and remain in this business," he reflects, "you have to have such a passion and enjoyment for what you do. It's hard work and stress, and you have to love doing it, otherwise you would soon bail out or get another job. It's not the easiest job in the world, but it has its hugely gratifying and wonderful moments, as well as its very difficult moments, and I've had my share of all of them. There have even been times in the early Nineties where there wasn't much work about, and I really considered if this was going to carry on. Is this the profession for me, or am I going to have to think of something else to do? But then the phone rang and another film came along, and I've been in the business now for 24 years."