Toronto ComiCon: Dickey Beer Q&A
Dickey Beer is known to hardcore Star Wars fans as the stunt man who helped on filming Return of the Jedi. Although looking at the soft-spoken older gentleman from the Netherlands, it might be hard to believe that he is a master stunt performer from Hollywood. This weekend at Toronto ComiCon he sat down with fans to regale us with tales from his storied career.
While his IMDB page boasts around 100 credits, he claims “I have closer to 150 credits, but some of those are so bad I just didn’t want my name on it!”
He is known for playing stunt double to Jeremy Bulloch’s Boba Fett, as well as a Gamorrean guard, the first Jabba henchman to fall into the Sarlacc pit, and the Scout trooper who crashed into a tree on Endor. But fame hasn’t gone to his head. In fact, he claims, “9 years ago my daughter came home from school and told me I was famous, I asked her what I was famous for. She said a classmate had a book about Star Wars where it mentioned I played Boba Fett and I asked her, ‘Who the hell is Boba Fett?'”.
38 years ago, he claims he didn’t know he would become a stunt performer – “I had a desk job that I really didn’t like and ended up quitting… 3 weeks later I auditioned for Star Wars.”
However, in spite of the cultural explosion of Star Wars, Beer admits that he hasn’t watched the series all the way through: “I don’t have a favourite Star Wars movie. I don’t look at a movie as a story being told, I see it as a job. I’m really the worst movie watcher because I can see where mistakes are happening behind the scenes.”
A highlight from tales of his career include a day on the set of Return of the Jedi where Carrie Fisher saved his life during on-set shenanigans. He recalls playing a Gamorrean guard during a take where Leia had to knock him over to escape:
“The costume was huge, it took 3 crewmen to lift me back up and I couldn’t take the head off by myself. We were shooting on location in Arizona so I really couldn’t breathe. After we did a take, lunch was called and the crew went off while I was stuck on the floor. Eventually I passed out, because I was re-breathing my own air, but the next thing I remember is having the costume head pulled off and Leia slapping me awake… it was almost like a nice dream. Everyone ate together so she must have noticed, ‘Where’s Dickey?’ and came back up to set. I believe she did save my life.”
Beer would go on to build some of the first airbags used for stunts people in movies, used commonly to ensure the safety of performers when free-falling from tall heights. “I built the prototypes from bedsheets, then the final model from pvc.” he explains, “At the time I didn’t have anyone telling me how to make the equipment. But now I’m teaching guys how to work with the gear for stunts. You just have to go out there and test it.”
While CGI has taken over much of the film industry, Dickey is confident there will always be a place for stunt workers: “They still need us to go out and film the image in order for them to alter it on the computers.”
Hard at work since the late 1970’s, Dickey went on to explain, careful not to brag, about him never turning down a stunt: “Because when they come to me with something that looks impossible, I think nothing is impossible, as long as I have the time and money to prepare myself. So, so far I’ve never said no to a stunt.”
Although, he did make sure to point out that “I’ve developed a system for crashing a plane and walking away from it. But so far, no one has come up with the money to test it.”
Goes to show that in Hollywood, badass people come in more shapes and sizes than you might think.
