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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.”
Davies is of the “just ignore them” school of thought and she beams positivity with a bright, perfect smile. The 29-year-old from Denbigh, north Wales is both girl next door and glamazon. It’s Monday morning but she’s looking very Friday night: dolled up for a shoot, pristine makeup defining the pretty angles of her face, slicked-back hair, gold 1980s earrings. Davies is warm and open without giving everything away. She is steeped in the language of personal growth and being one’s best self, the kind of person who on her musical theatre podcast, Call to Stage, will share mottoes such as “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone”, and comes across as very sincere.
We’re here to talk about her touring with Legally Blonde the Musical, but we can’t ignore the cultural juggernaut that is Strictly, in which she reached the final. Yes, being part of it is as good as everyone says it is: “Being in the Strictly bubble, it’s so magical. I’ll never experience anything like that again. I’m heartbroken it’s over.” No, she doesn’t think the format needs a shake-up, nor does she have any suggestions for new presenters. Her experience on set was never any less than supportive, but still it hurts when people are horrible to you online.
A lot of it was people saying she shouldn’t be there because of her previous dance training (she was a last minute stand-in for an injured Dani Dyer), but fan fave Lewis Cope also had dance training and didn’t get the abuse. “Well, I’m a woman,” says Davies, adding, “I am ambitious. And [people think] confidence comes across as being stuck-up. But if you’re too sweet, you’re fake, so you can’t do anything right.” There was an article in one paper about her being a diva, and that bothered her more than online comments (“At the end of the day, not everyone’s going to like everyone”), because she felt a narrative was being built about her. “And I just want to say, none of this is true!”
Davies has been here before. When she landed her first big stage job, post-Love Island, in the musical 9 to 5 (in the Jane Fonda role), people couldn’t wait to say that she was a talentless reality TV blow-in who hadn’t paid her dues. Except that Davies had been dancing and singing since she was tiny, putting on shows with her older sister Jade in the living room, which they’d charge their nana £1.50 to watch. At 13 she was coming to London for training, and moved there at 16 to study musical theatre at Urdang. She’s clearly a grafter.
on Love Island. Photograph: ITV/REX/Shutterstock
Davies had been scrambling about for work after graduating (cruise ship, backing singing) when the ITV dating show Love Island approached her, via Instagram. “I had the summer of my life,” she says, no regrets. Do people on that show really think they’re going to find love? “Yes,” she says straight away. “And I know my truth was that I did genuinely fall in love.” She split with boyfriend Kem Cetinay after five months (although she tells me she’s still in touch with his mum, which is totally on brand for the very wholesome, family-oriented Davies), and although she enjoyed the whirl of celeb parties, there was something missing: musical theatre.
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.
Fans of the film will be pleased to hear that Elle’s famous “bend and snap” move survives in the choreography by Leah Hill, but Hill – recently assistant choreographer on the Wicked films – has ideas of her own. “She is so unique in the way that she thinks, she’s ahead of the game,” says Davies. “She doesn’t stick to one genre, one style – there’s one section where we go from hip-hop to ballet in one breath. She is one to watch.”
Most of Davies’s roles have been in shows adapted from popular films – “Movie musicals are paying my mortgage!” – and she’s pragmatic about what that means for the theatre business. “This industry is extremely tough. It’s a lot easier to bring an audience in if they’re familiar with a story. It would be nice for there to be a space for brand new, original musicals, but I just think in this climate, we don’t see as much of a bite towards those.”
With over a million Instagram followers, Davies must have similar appeal to casting directors, although she’s quick to say, “I’ve had to fight tooth and nail for roles … I don’t think I’ve ever been given a role I haven’t deserved.” She’s also quick to champion others, especially her sister Jade, who she’ll tell you is the most talented person she knows. Jade walked into a job on Les Misérables at 19 and has been working ever since, often as a swing, which means understudying multiple ensemble roles: “That’s 10 times more difficult than what I do.” It was Jade’s reputation, says Davies, that gave her legitimacy within the industry when some people thought she was just a reality TV wannabe.
Davies’s boyfriend, Ben Joyce, is in the biz too. They met on the Back to the Future musical (he was playing Marty, she was Lorraine, his mum). He’s an impressive singer, and to go by his appearances on Davies’s podcast, also an incredibly sweet, unassuming man, who always has her dinner on the table for her when she gets in from a hard day’s rehearsal. He’s not very … Love Island, I say. Davies laughs. “He’s so amazingly talented. He’s the kindest soul in every room he walks into. Kindness and talent, that’s the combination of dreams.”
They’ve just bought a house together in London, where in the downstairs loo Davies hung a handwritten letter from Dolly Parton, who wrote the 9 to 5 show and was involved in the production. Parton always remembered everyone’s names and the conversations they’d had, Davies tells me. “She’s a very intelligent woman, very funny. Everybody thinks they know her, but I’d say she’s one of the most private women in the world.” A kind of privacy, perhaps, that rising stars just can’t have today when, thanks to social media, “everyone knows everything about everything”.
Davies comes across as confident but she struggles with nerves. “I’m terrible, and it’s getting worse as I get older,” she says. “My nerves on Strictly were horrific – that was next level, like, numb hands.” She traces the fear back to singing at an Eisteddfod in Wales. “I was about 11 or 12 and I went wrong on national television. I completely stopped.” Nerves or not, there’s no stopping her now. “People say to me, ‘Oh, what do you want to do after musical theatre? I’m like, ‘I literally want to do this for the rest of my life,’” beams Davies. “I want to do eight shows a week for the rest of my life, and I’ll be happy.”
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