entertainment business can be both rough and easy for a little person.
Rough for obvious reasons – it’s not like there are a lot of roles
requiring dwarfs and midgets, and the ones that do are usually demeaning
(as aptly satirized in Peter Dinklage’s movie-stealing-scene from Living In Oblivion).
The only silver lining here is that if you’re a great actor who just
happens to be a little person, you can probably clean the fuck up with
available roles. I don’t think any other little person, living or dead,
has found their way into more noteworthy films than Warwick Davis
(he even has an awesome name for a little person!).
Now the UK’s Press Association
reports that BBC demigods Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais have created
an up-coming television series specifically for the lil’ super star
called Life’s Too Short. Gervais describes the show thusly, “It’s about his life – the life of a showbiz dwarf. He plays himself,
we play ourselves, it’s sort of like Curb Your Enthusiasm.“
Gervais underwhelmed somewhat embarrassingly with the horribly titled, The Invention of Lying, but Merchant and Gervais as a duo have been batting 1000 thus far (don’t know how Cemetery Junction is), especially when it comes to television. I’m getting a little bored by all these
celebrities-as-themselves projects, but given M&G’s track record, I see no reason to assume Life’s Too Short won’t be another brilliantly funny series.