John Rhys-Davies
John Rhys-Davies
John Rhys-Daviesis a Welsh actor and voice actor known for his portrayal of Gimli in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the charismatic Arab excavator Sallah in the Indiana Jones films. He also played Agent Michael Malone in the 1993 remake of the 1950s television series The Untouchables, Pilot Vasco Rodrigues in the mini-series Shōgun, Professor Maximillian Arturo in Sliders, King Richard I in Robin of Sherwood, General Leonid Pushkin in the James Bond film The Living Daylights, and...
NationalityWelsh
ProfessionActor
Date of Birth5 May 1944
I count myself a a rationalist and a skeptic with a very conscious awareness of my indebtedness to Western Christian civilization, and I am a fairly passionate defender of it.
I am a believer in the evolutionary process, and yet I have sympathy for the friends of mine who are creationists. I don't find the positions incompatible.
How stupid do you have to be to imagine that you can turn 'The Lord Of The Rings' into a film script?
I enjoy acting. It's not that I begin to think I'm getting better. I now fully know that I've made no improvement whatsoever since I was 20. I can live with it.
Spying is a like a game of chess: Sometimes you have to withdraw, sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win - preferably a knight rather than a king or queen.
The script of 'Shogun' was so tight that you could not take a word out of a sentence, you could not take a sentence out of a scene, and you certainly couldn't take out a scene without putting ripples right through the back or the front of the overall story.
Actually, I'm addicted to science fiction. Let me make my diction clear - I love sci-fi.
Villains are a lot of fun. My villains have a lot of tongue-in-cheek. They are sometimes conscious of and a little bit gleeful of their villainy.
The word 'career' and 'actor' really don't fit in the same paragraph, let alone sentence. There is no career structure for actors.
I like heroes, and would like to be a hero myself. I suppose we all want that.
In the film world, we can all be heroes. In the real world, where heroism can cost you your life or the life of the ones you love, people aren't so willing to make those sacrifices. When they do, they are set apart from the rest of us.
Sometimes you learn more from films that aren't terribly successful and, indeed, sometimes you learn more from real disasters than you do from the ones that succeed.
Hollywood is a far safer place to work than working abroad, because of the skill level, and because of the safety considerations that experience and unionization have created.
To be an actor for 30-odd years trying to become recognized, and to end up playing a full prosthetic and a character 3 foot 9′, or something like that, is... well, it just shows that you can get actors to do anything.