She started out performing in her living room, charging £1.50 a ticket. Now, having blazed through Love Island and silenced her Strictly haters, the Welsh sensation is really hitting the big time
At the end of last year’s Strictly Come Dancing semi-final, pro dancer Nikita Kuzmin made a tearful appeal to camera, “I speak to the audience at home: guys, just please, please be kind!” His celebrity partner, Love Island winner, Dancing on Ice contestant and musical theatre actor Amber Davies, had been getting a lot of flak online. “You have had so much hate, every single day,” said Kuzmin.
Isn’t it crazy that we have to remind people to be nice to other humans who are just doing their job, I say to Davies, when we meet in a London hotel bar. “I genuinely think it’s getting worse,” says Davies, who has been in the public eye since 2017. “With TikTok, when people jump on a bandwagon, they go for it,” she adds. “But I feel like the nasty comments I was getting [on Strictly] weren’t actually coming from the younger audience, they came from the older audience.”…
Since getting positive reviews in 9 to 5, Davies has also starred in Bring It On, Back to the Future, Pretty Woman, The Great Gatsby, and now Legally Blonde, playing Elle Woods, the Reese Witherspoon character from the 2001 film. “When I heard it was going back out on tour I had to audition for it. It was a no-brainer for me, a dream role,” she says. The story of a fashion-obsessed sorority girl who becomes a hotshot Harvard law student matches the film, although it’s set in the present day.
There’s a cartoony element to Elle, with her everything-pink wardrobe and handbag-sized dog, but, says Davies, “When I went into the audition I played her very human, and the director Nikolai [Foster] wants to take it in that direction. You have to recreate it with your life experience.” After all, Davies knows a bit about being underestimated herself. “I feel like I was destined to play this role because I’ve had my own version of that. It’s literally going to be incredible,” she says, in a very Elle Woods way….
