Herve Villechaize film: TRUE story of star Roger Moore called a 'diseased sex maniac'

His father called him a “freak”, Moore told unkind anecdotes about him chasing horrified prostitutes and the public remember him as a colourful and entertaining sideshow. But one week before he took his own life, Villechaize had a last chance to finally reveal the heartbreaking reality behind the myth – and he took it. 

A new HBO film, My Dinner With Herve, tells the true story of his chance meeting with journalist Sacha Gervasi (played by Dornan), a story Gervasi has turned into a labour of love with Dinklage that took 15 long years to make it onto the screen.

It restores dignity and perspective when just two years ago his James Bond co-star regaled audiences with tales of his sexual pecadillos. Moore told a London theatre: “He was a very small man and he used to touch me and I used to say, ‘Don’t touch me. You are diseased.’

“I wasn’t being cruel about his size, it was just that he was a sex maniac. He had a lust for ladies, unnatural.”

“When we were in Hong Kong he would find girls in girly clubs and go with a flashlight, ‘You, you, not you.'”

In a staggering evocation of the bygone days of promiscuity and sexism, Moore added that he asked Villechaize how many women he had slept during the film shoot in the Far East: “He told me 35. I told him that did not count as he paid for them, but he said, ‘Sometimes when I pay they refuse.'”

Apart from the now-unacceptable ethics, the tragedy is also how all this would have been recounted for laughs, when it exposes the desperation and daily struggles of a man not even prostitutes would sleep with.

Villechaize was well aware of how he was regarded but was also the agent of much of his own misfortune. The movie shows how his Fantasy Island co-star Ricardo Montalban (played by Andy Garcia) tried to help his angry and self-destructive friend.

Gervasi revealed that the diminutive actor, who was only 3’11, poured out his life story across three extraordinary meetings (distilled in the movie into one dinner) and made him promise to tell his story one day.

They met in 1993, nine years after Villechaise had been fired from Fantasy Island over his pay demands and unwelcome propositioning of female cast members and crew. He had barely worked since.

Gervasi was sent to LA to interview Gore Vidal and Villechaize was supposed to be an amusing throwaway sidebar. Instead, the star forced the journalist to see his powerful and painful side of the story.

After Gervasi asked a stock series of superficial questions, he turned to leave and Villechaise pulled out a small knife.

Gervasi said the star told him: “‘Listen, you’ve written the story before you got here. You just wanted Tattoo stories and Man with the Golden Gun stories. So I’ve told you all the bullsh*t. Do you want to hear the real story of my life?’”

The journalist also confirmed that the final 20 or 30 minutes of the film, including their farewell, happened exactly as shown on screen: “He tugged at my sleeve and he pulled me down so that our faces were side by side. He looked me in the eye. He had such pain and defiance with tears in his eyes and he said, ‘Tell them, I regret nothing.’”

Indeed in his suicide note a week later, Villechaize wrote: “I love everybody. Nobody is to blame for this.”

His girlfriend Kathy Self revealed that he had been suffering from chronic pain due to the stresses his normal-sized organs were putting on his small body.

Gervasi knew that everything he heard deserved to be told: “As he was telling me this story, I was thinking. ‘My god, there’s so much more to him than this (Fantasy Island) punch line… He is a tremendously complex, contradictory, brave, crazy, hilarious, wonderful, dangerous person. He was the most original person I think I’d ever met, so I promised him that I would one day tell his story.”

When Self called him to tell him her partner had taken his life, Gervasi remembered his reaction: “I spontaneously got incredibly emotional. I started listening back to the tapes and I realized that he knew he was going to do it. For some random reason, he just grabbed onto whatever journalist passed by and poured his guts out to me in literally the final week of his life. He’d entrusted me with his story and, in effect, I was his suicide note.”

My Dinner With Herve will premiere on HBO in the US on October 19 and Sky Atlantic in the UK on Monday October 22 at 9pm.