Over the past 50 years, John Rhys-Davies has starred alongside Dame Julie Andrews (twice), Sir Derek Jacobi in TV classic I, Claudius, and Timothy Dalton in Bond film The Living Daylights, as well as voicing countless cartoon favourites and – most famously – appearing in two of the most successful film franchises of all time: The Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones.
In the first film, he played the gruff but charming and forthright dwarf Gimli, helping Frodo (Elijah Wood) on his journey to destroy the enticing but terrible ‘One Ring’ with a company of hobbits, humans, a wizard, and an elf.
In the latter, he played Sallah, Indiana Jones’ (Harrison Ford) Egyptian excavation companion, in the sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was his Hollywood debut in 1981.
At 79, the Welsh actor, who grew up in modern-day Tanzania, is still in demand, advertising his appearance this summer in new Victorian thriller The Gates and making a welcome comeback for Indy’s last trip in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
After missing Temple of Doom in 1984, Rhys-Davies last wore Sallah’s distinctive red fez – nearly as familiar as Indy’s own tattered brown hat – in 1989’s Last Crusade, so fans have been kept waiting almost 30 years to see his bracing, booming-voiced character again.
When questioned about his return to the franchise for the recently released picture, which marks Ford’s departure from the role, the actor is thoughtful, yet candid (and literary).
‘You know that wonderful line of T.S. Eliot’s: ‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do’? Harrison’s control of the films is essential. It is the continuing adventures of Harrison, of the Hamlet character, really,’ he says.
He claims that there were “reasons for not deploying Sallah” in the second Indiana Jones film before returning to assist Ford and Sir Sean Connery as Indy’s father on a third mission.
His argument for not returning for 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, widely regarded as the worst chapter in the canon, is far more to the point.
‘In the fourth one, they offered me a small sum of money to come into a green screen, sit down – just in a chair – and cheer at Marion (Karen Allen) and Indy’s wedding. And I thought no, the character is more important than that.’
‘When you think about it, he is possibly the only filmic Arab hero in the last 50, 60 years of film,’ Rhys-Davies argues, protective of the character.
He concedes that the ‘interesting but tragic’ Egyptian-born actor Omar Sharif – star of movies including Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia and Funny Girl – could be one too.
‘But Sallah is an Arab hero and more than that, there is a humanity and a grounding at least in the first one that sort of adds something to the movie.’
So, more specifically, why did he say yes this time around?
‘I could not turn down [the return] – you can’t, it would be disrespectful to Harrison, for whom I have a great deal of respect, and to the audience really not to appear.’
‘It was my belief and understanding that the part would be a bit bigger,’ he adds, laughing, and it’s true that the franchise’s fans may be disappointed to see him underutilised in a cast that also includes Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Indy’s goddaughter Helena, Mads Mikkelsen and Antonio Banderas.
Rhys-Davies is certain that the picture will be a summer blockbuster, but he is wary of his personal response to the film after such a lengthy absence.
‘I don’t actually know what my feeling is about the film. I’ve seen it once and I will see it again before I actually make my judgments because a number of the things that I found interesting, curious, odd, other people are saying quite different things about.’
He also admits to comparing it to the original picture, which he adores – as do many of us – and remembers particularly impressing him when it was released.
‘I think my problem is I remember watching the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the cinema for the first time and seeing that opening sequence, which ends with him jumping into a plane with a python, and being depressed and thinking, “Oh my god, this is possibly the most exciting opening of a movie that I have ever seen. How the heck are we ever going to match this, let alone top it?” And then watching it top it!’ the Emmy nominee recalls.
‘But I think that [James] Mangold is a great director. The cast is really good – I mean, it really is a damn good cast – the script is good, and Harrison, of course, is wonderful,’ Rhys-Davies adds.
Returning to Raiders, we talk about the actor’s experience working with the capuchin monkey who is ordered by her one-eyed assassin master to track Marion and Indy, and who first befriends Sallah’s family.
‘I have worked with children, and I have worked with animals. I’ve worked with failed animals – literally, we’ve had to rewrite scenes because the animal did not do what the animal was supposed to do!’
According to The Complete Making of Indiana Jones, he doesn’t recall any complications with his animal co-star on this occasion, despite one of the initial two monkeys hired being hospitalised with a mental breakdown upon arriving in Tunisia for production.
Rhys-Davies, on the other hand, is sympathetic.
‘Those little monkeys have a different body language to us, and we don’t understand them. When a monkey is fearful, it will show aggression and it shows its teeth. When we smile with delight, we show our teeth – [so] it’s a little monkey, trapped, that can’t get away with these big monkeys all saying, “I’m going to bite you” in terms of their body language. I happen to know about that because I had a couple of monkeys as pets when I was a boy out in Africa.
‘But the smile that you always want to give a small animal is a threat to a little monkey, so it’s not surprising they were distressed. But I thought the monkeys behaved pretty darn well in Raiders.’
He also ‘loves’ horses and has worked with them without incident – except, it appears, impressing his children.
‘My daughter, who jumps at about one meter 40 or 50, does not believe that I can ride a horse at all. I say to her, “Why don’t you have a look at Sahara with Brooke Shields?” You see me leading a cavalry charge and that really is me!’
‘She hasn’t seen Raiders [or other] Indiana Jones films, she hasn’t seen Lord of the Rings. What can you do?’ he adds.
However, his 17-year-old daughter, Maia, whom he shares with partner Lisa Manning, has not missed out on every gem in her father’s filmography.
‘She saw The Princess Diaries 2 because her friends insisted,’ says the proud father, referring to his second collaboration with Dame Julie after 1982’s Victor/Victoria, in which he played the devious Viscount Mabrey, uncle to Chris Pine’s character Lord Nicholas Devereaux, whom he plans to use to depose Mia (Anne Hathaway) as ruler of Genovia.
He brings up the continuous claims of a third Princess Diaries film, which have kept die-hard fans interested throughout the years, unprompted.
‘I introduced [Maia] to Chris Pine the other day at a fan convention and Chris and I were talking because there are rumours still of doing a third one. We were doing one, but [director] Garry Marshall died and that was a great shame – what a lovely man, what a lovely director. A joy to work with.’
In Stephen Hall’s period horror The Gates, Rhys-Davies plays post-mortem photographer turned paranormal investigator Frederick Ladbroke, which is a departure from his previous roles.
Around the start of the twentieth century, he was driven to the idea by “that bizarre response against the scientific ethos of Darwinism and ‘God is dead,’ and [how] it adds that extra weight to credulity and a belief – a fascination – with the occult and spiritualism.”
As an example, he mentions Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s involvement with the Cottingley Fairies, a series of staged images of young cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths playing with fairies that captivated the public’s interest when he used them to illustrate an essay he published in 1920.
‘It’s still an age where a single scientist in a field feels that he can make a significant contribution to science and I find that whole complexity of ideas, that sort of Victorian pessimism that there is nothing beyond this life [fascinating]. That refusal to accept the absolute term godless universe or spiritless universe that Darwin seems to suggest to some Victorians and that insistence that there is something and it must be found – and I love that, I love that intellectual turmoil as much as anything,’ shares Rhys-Davies.
The actor identifies as ‘a rationalist and a sceptic’ when it comes to the paranormal but is clearly interested in the debate and arguments surrounding the existence of parallel universes as ‘given enough space and enough time, anything is possible’.
‘If you can believe in a Boltzmann brain, that out of quantum froth an intelligence can emerge, then to say there is no God, that seems to be quite fatuous. What we find statistically so breathtaking is the circumstances that permit our universe to exist, and life to be in it, and intelligent life to evolve. You eliminate an awful lot of universes when you do that – and I think it is a legitimate question, why should anything exist? I think it’s a scientific question still, even though it’s not something that science need necessarily ever have an answer to. But I think it is legitimate to ask that question.
‘So, the answer is, do I personally believe in the occult and in spirits? No, I see no evidence for it. But absence of proof is no proof of absence.’
The Gates, from 101 Films, is available on digital platforms now, including Sky, Amazon and iTunes. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is in cinemas nationwide now.
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