On March 11th, Warwick Davis walked into Windsor Castle wearing a royal blue suit and walked out with an OBE pinned to his chest, presented by Prince William himself. And somewhere across the horror community, every person who grew up watching a murderous green creature cackle its way through six increasingly unhinged sequels felt an emotion they couldn’t quite name.
Pride, I think. We feel pride.
A Brief History of a Man Who Did Everything
Warwick Davis was eleven years old when George Lucas put him in a furry Ewok suit and pointed a camera at him on the set of Return of the Jedi. That was 1983. He has not stopped working since, which is a sentence that undersells the sheer volume of what that actually means across forty-three years of screen time.
Willow. Leprechaun. Professor Flitwick across eight Harry Potter films. Filius Flitwick again in the upcoming HBO reboot, because the man is apparently contractually obligated to that role until one of them stops existing. Marvin the Paranoid Android. Weazel in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. A career so wide and varied that listing it starts to feel less like a filmography and more like a challenge to find something he wasn’t in.
He was named in King Charles’ New Year Honours list for 2026 alongside Idris Elba and Cynthia Erivo, recognized for his services to drama and charity — specifically for co-founding Little People UK in 2012 with his late wife Samantha, a charity supporting people with dwarfism that has since raised hundreds of thousands of pounds. Samantha passed away in 2024, and Warwick dedicated his BAFTA Fellowship last year to her. On Tuesday, standing in Windsor Castle with his children Annabelle and Harrison beside him, he accepted the OBE in her memory too.
The man has been through it. He deserves a medal. He got one. This is the good timeline.
The Part Where We Talk About Leprechaun
We are a horror site. We must discuss Leprechaun.
The year was 1993. The film was low budget, deeply unhinged, and featured a pre-fame Jennifer Aniston fleeing a homicidal Irish folklore creature across a rural property while the creature in question delivered puns with the cheerful commitment of someone who genuinely loves their job. It made $8.6 million on a $900,000 budget and spawned five sequels that sent the Leprechaun to Las Vegas, to the hood (twice), to space, and into a situation involving a pogo stick that I am not going to explain but that you should absolutely look up.
Warwick Davis played the Leprechaun in all five original films. He played that character with total commitment and absolutely zero restraint, which is the only correct approach to playing a murderous supernatural entity who leaves rhyming couplets at crime scenes. He understood the assignment. The assignment was chaos. He delivered chaos.
The Leprechaun franchise is not prestige horror. It is not trying to be prestige horror. It is a sequence of films that exists to deliver a specific, glorious, deeply silly kind of entertainment — the kind where you are laughing and slightly horrified simultaneously and can’t entirely explain the ratio. Davis made all of it work. He made a character that should have been unwatchable into something genuinely iconic, which is a skill that deserves formal recognition and has now, finally, received it.
The Moment Everyone Is Talking About
During the investiture ceremony, Prince William bent down so that he and Warwick were at eye level before pinning the medal to his jacket. He didn’t stand above him. He came down to meet him.
Warwick spoke about it afterward. “It was lovely the way he came down to my level instead of standing and looking down at me,” he said.
That’s it. That’s the whole story. One person choosing to make another person feel seen rather than looked past, in a room full of cameras, in front of one of the oldest institutions in the country. Nobody made a speech about it. It just happened.
The internet, correctly, lost its mind a little.
What It Means
There is a version of Warwick Davis’ career story that gets told as an underdog narrative — the kid who beat the odds, the actor who kept working in spite of the industry, the man who turned a physical difference into a career-long act of visibility and advocacy. That version is true and it is also slightly incomplete, because it frames everything as happening despite something rather than simply happening because Warwick Davis is very good at his job and extremely difficult to look away from.
He got the OBE because he made extraordinary work across four decades and because he built something real and useful with Little People UK at a time when that kind of visibility in charity work genuinely moved things forward. Those two facts coexist without one of them being a consolation prize for the other.
He also played a homicidal Leprechaun with a pogo stick six times and we will never forget it.
Congratulations, Warwick. The horror community, which has loved you since 1993 and will love you until the credits roll, salutes you.
The gold isn’t in the shoe, mate. It’s been in the filmography the whole time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries