John Rhys-Davies has enjoyed a long and distinguished career over the past 50 years, starring opposite the likes of 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.
As dwarf Gimli in the first, he was the grumpy but lovable and straightforward member of the Fellowship, guiding Frodo (Elijah Wood) on his quest to destroy the seductive but evil ‘One Ring’ alongside a band of hobbits, humans, a wizard and an elf.
In the latter – the first of which, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was his Hollywood breakthrough in 1981 – he portrayed whip-cracking archaeologist Indiana Jones’ (Harrison Ford) Egyptian excavator friend, Sallah.
At 79, the Welsh star – who spent his childhood being raised in modern-day Tanzania – continues to be in demand, promoting his appearance this summer in new Victorian thriller The Gates as well as making a welcome return for Indy’s last outing in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Rhys-Davies last donned Sallah’s iconic red fez – almost as recognisable as Indy’s own battered brown fedora – way back in 1989’s Last Crusade, having skipped Temple of Doom in 1984, so fans have been kept waiting over 30 years to see his bracing, booming-voiced character again.
When asked about his return to the franchise once more for the newly-released film – which marks Ford’s retirement from the role – the actor is in a reflective, but frank (and literary), mood.
‘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 tells Metro.co.uk.
He mentions that there ‘were reasons for not using Sallah’ in the second Indiana Jones film, before he returned to help out Ford and Sir Sean Connery as Indy’s father on a third mission.
His explanation for not returning for 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, considered by many to be the weakest entry in the canon, is much 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 confident the film will be a summer blockbuster, but a little more hesitant about this own reaction to the movie, after so long away.
‘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 he’s comparing it to the first film, for which he has a fierce fondness – as do many of us – and particularly remembers wowing 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 discuss the actor’s experience working with the capuchin monkey who is assigned to follow Marion and Indy by her one-eyed assassin master, who ingratiates herself at the start with 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!’
However, he doesn’t recall any issues with his animal co-star on this occasion, despite one of the original two monkeys hired being hospitalised with a nervous breakdown upon arrival in Tunisia for filming, according to The Complete Making of Indiana Jones.
Rhys-Davies has sympathy though.
‘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 too without much issue – bar impressing his children, it seems.
‘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 youngest, Maia, 17 – who he shares with partner Lisa Manning – has not missed out on every gem in her father’s film catalogue though.
‘She has seen The Princess Diaries 2 because her friends insisted,’ the proud dad reveals, which marked his second time working with Dame Julie after 1982’s Victor/Victoria, and saw him play the devious Viscount Mabrey, uncle to Chris Pine’s character Lord Nicholas Devereaux, whom he plans to use to oust Mia (Anne Hathaway) as ruler of Genovia.
Unprompted, he brings up the ongoing (now official) reports of a third Princess Diaries film, which have kept die-hard fans going over the years.
‘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.’
His latest central role in Stephen Hall’s period horror The Gates is rather a shift in tone, as Rhys-Davies plays post-mortem photographer turned paranormal investigator Frederick Ladbroke.
He was drawn to the project by ‘that strange reaction against the scientific ethos of Darwinism and ‘God is dead’, and [how it] lends that extra weight to credulity and a belief – a fascination – with the occult and spiritualism’ around the turn of the twentieth century.
He cites Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s involvement with the Cottingley Fairies as an example, a series of faked photographs showing young cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths playing with fairies, that captured the public’s imagination when he used them to illustrate an article he wrote 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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