Warwick Davis

Warwick Davis has been working since he was eleven, which is when he played Wicket the Ewok in Return of the Jedi in 1983. He carried that character into two spin-off television films and has appeared somewhere in the Star Wars films for four decades, under different prosthetics and different names, most of which audiences never connect back to him.

Five years after the Ewok he got a lead. Willow in 1988 is a fantasy adventure built entirely around him, and it is still unusual for exactly that reason: a dwarf actor playing the hero rather than a creature, a servant or a joke, with the film's emotional weight resting on his performance. He returned to the part for a television continuation in 2022. In between he took the other sort of work available, playing the title monster across the Leprechaun horror series from 1993 to 2003, which he has always discussed with more affection than embarrassment.

The Harry Potter films gave him a second long-running home and two characters at once: Professor Filius Flitwick across the series and the goblin Griphook in the final films. Add the Narnia and Star Wars work and the arithmetic turns strange, since he is among the highest-grossing supporting actors in film history and has the highest average gross of any of them, a statistic almost nobody would attach to his name.

He also presents, writes, directs and produces, and played a version of himself in the sitcom Life's Too Short, which he co-created.