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Australian for Wow!
Screw the Olympics. Actress Kimberley Davies is the tastiest thing to come from Down Under since a can of Foster’s.
Stuff,
2/20/2003
By Jonathan Small
The first thing you should know about Kimberley Davies is that her name is not Kimberley Davis—even if that’s how it sounds (and whatever you do, do not pronounce it Dav-eees). “It drives me crazy,” she says. “Everyone gets it wrong. I’m thinking about changing it. They even spelled it wrong in the credits of The Next Best Thing.” Hardly seems fair, since she played a waitress who served up a tongue lashing to queen bitch Madonna in this spring’s flick and managed to make the Queen of Pop look like nothing more than, well, the next best thing. If all goes as planned, name recognition won’t be a problem for long. She’s starring in two films this year: Psycho Beach Party (don’t worry—it’s a parody, not a schlock fest) and a comedy called The Shrink Is In, costarring her new Friend, Courteney Cox. But if you were smart, you’d have realized that you didn’t have to blow 10 bucks at the multiplex to catch Ms. Davies in all her majesty, because she’s been hanging around your living room. She’s appeared on Early Edition
and a very special Ally McBeal, in which she turned the normally lame fantasy sequence of the week into every guy’s dream by revealing her extremely compelling body of evidence on the witness stand.
The truth is that Kimberley is already a guilty-pleasure star in her native Australia and in the U.K., where her TV soap Neighbours,
on which she appeared from ’93 to ’96, was Australian for Melrose Place. It still has a cult following and is shown in reruns twice a day. Kimberley’s flawless face and Baywatch body appear on calendars and magazine covers Down Under and in England as often as Bill Clinton appears at depositions over here. So does her relative stateside anonymity bum her out? “Not really,” she says. “Here, I can do whatever I want. I don’t have
my character’s name screamed at me like it is at home. I played a bitch on the show, so I get lots of abuse.” We promise to be nice.
STUFF: The Aussies and Brits are already fanatical about you. Have you had any creepy encounters
with overzealous fans?
Kimberley: Well, when I give autographs, some guys want me to sign, like, every body part you
can imagine. This one guy wanted me to sign his butt, but I said, “No thanks.” I’m not going to sign any private parts.
Do your looks reduce people to acting like idiots around you?
I either get people who assume I’m stupid and act like smart-asses or people—mostly men, obviously—who are overly nice to me. Like at the bank, I’ll see the teller be an ass to the guy before me on line, and then he sees me and he’s like, “Hiiiiiiii!”
What’s the worst pickup line you’ve ever heard?
I was as at a party in Hollywood, and someone came up next to me, looked up at the sky and said, “Aren’t the stars amazing?” You can never see the stars in L.A. I mean,
at least give me something I can see—something to work with.
How are Australian women different from American women?
Different sense of humor. I think that Aussie women are cruder—it cracks me up.
What’s the crudest joke you know?
It’s not really a joke—it’s a true story: This guy I knew went to a party at a huge house, and he had diarrhea. So he’s like, “Oh, my God—I have to find a bathroom.” He runs upstairs and sees the edge of a bathtub and thinks, Ahh, it’s a bathroom. He doesn’t even have time to turn the light on or make it over to the toilet. He figures, I’ll poo in the bath and wash it down because it’s going to be liquid. When he’s finished, he turns on the light and realizes that he’s crapped all over the seafood on ice! True story, I swear.
Holy cow. How could you have known that was just the kind of classy story we were looking for? You must be psychic.
Oh, yeah. My gut feelings are usually correct, so in some ways, that’s
a psychic thing. Once I was driving in Australia, and I remember something telling me to look up, and there was a Channel 10 ad on the side of a skyscraper. I saw it and said out loud, “I’m going to get a role on Neighbours,” which was on that channel. I got it a couple of months later.
Do you see dead people?
Not really, but I think my grandfather visits me at night in my dreams. He asks me how I’m doing, and we go to the park and just talk. Then he says, “I’ve got to go back to death,” and leaves again, and I wake up.
Were you the model child or a juvenile delinquent?
I was a bit of a nightmare. You know, I went through the usual teenage thing: lying to my parents, going to nightclubs and smoking and drinking. Guys didn’t take a liking to me until I was about 16, and then we began the “discovery.” I was always very girlie growing up. When I was seven, I would play Barbie and make my sister be Ken. I would always have a scene where I’d say to Ken, “I’m leaving you. I don’t want to be with you anymore.” And he’d say, “No, Barbie—please don’t!” I’d make him cry.
Ever bring a grown man to tears?
Yes, I have, actually. But it was completely justified. He deserved
to cry.
What’s the one thing that makes you violently psychotic?
Bad drivers. I always enforce my position in traffic. Like if someone tries to butt in front of me, I’ll scream and yell at him. The road is one place where I’m quite psychotic. I’ve got to try to control myself.
What do you do in your more passive moments?
Right now, I’m really into kickboxing. Whoever I’m angry at, I just put his head on the bag and kick the crap out of it. It’s great. They actually did a study on it, and it’s been proven that kickboxing reduces depression in people significantly. So I just imagine who I’m mad at and put all my might into hitting the bag as hard as I can.
Um, check please…
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