The Girl Next Door
KIMBERLEY NIXON is a face you might recognise from the recent ITV1 drama Kidnap And Ransom or hot comedy Fresh Meat, but chances are you’ve also seen her in the bus queue or the corner shop. The successful Welsh actress from Ponty tells us about going back to drama after a hit comedy and why she missed her graduation to hang out with Dame Judi Dench.
Kimberley Nixon just can’t get her head round the fact that last year she was officially declared Wales’s sexiest woman. The blonde star of Cranford and Fresh Meat insists: “I’m a tomboy and quite clumsy so I’m more like the anti-sexy icon. “When they told me about it I just thought, ‘There’s more ammo for my brothers to use against me’.” But the 26-year-old actress seems to specialise in being involved in toe-curling moments. Like the one in last year’s surprise Channel 4 hit comedy series, Fresh Meat, when Nixon’s character heroically agreed to take a housemate’s virginity, not knowing he just lost it earlier in the day. Or the time her character in 2008 movie Easy virtue came off stage to learn that the traditional way to dance the cancan does not, after all, require you to remove your underwear. In fact that scene, in one of Nixon’s first acting roles, proved horribly embarrassing for the actress herself as she prepared to perform in front of a packed set. “You know when you’re bright red and you just want the floor to open up and swallow you?” she says. “That’s how I felt before doing the scene. It felt so busy in there, it was like the catering department had come in to watch.” Nixon was saved from further indignity by the intervention of her A-list co-star Jessica Biel. “Jessica said, ‘You did ask for a closed set?’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ and she said, ‘Oh honey!’ and just walked off and got most of the people kicked out.” It was a valuable lesson for Nixon, who has also learnt that being successful is no barrier to good manners. “It’s nice to see someone at the top of their game can still be really nice, like Jessica, and Judi Dench on Cranford,” she says. And how many other drama students can boast they missed their graduation ceremonies because they were filming with a national treasure? Nixon explains: “I finished my degree from my trailer in Cranford - so I did graduate - but I didn’t get to go to my graduation because I was doing a scene with Judi Dench.” Nixon studied at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, where Aneurin Barnard, recently seen on screen playing David Bailey in We’ll Take Manhattan, was in the year below. “It’s funny because in the next couple of months I’ve got two
films coming out: Hunky Dory with Minnie Driver and Elfie Hopkins with Jamie Winstone, and Aneurin is in both of them. We’ve got the same agent and we joke that we’re a two-for- one offer,” she chuckles. The actress jumped at the chance to do Kidnap and Ransom with Trevor Eve because she loves action scenes and intense plots, although she’s also looking forward to filming the second series of Fresh Meat, the comedy about a gang of six university students sharing a house. “If it looks like we’re having a good time on screen that’s because we really were. We were six people who didn’t know each other, we all moved to Manchester for four months and, apart from the six hours of sleep every night, we were just together all the time. We loved it,” she says. Nixon enjoyed filming her ‘will they, won’t they’ sex storyline with Inbetweeners’ actor Joe Thomas, who plays housemate Kingsley, but she’s been lobbying the writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (of Peep Show fame) to smooth things out. “She was awful to him in the end. I’m begging Sam and Jesse that Josie makes it up to Kingsley because I feel terrible on her behalf!” she says. But Josie’s habit of sleeping around is one of the reasons Nixon likes playing her. “She’s the sensible-dressing, hard-working dental student. But she’s the one
ITV1 Kidnap and Ransom
who has this succession of boys. That’s real though, isn’t it? It’s always the quiet ones,” she says. Filming Fresh Meat was a university experience of sorts for Nixon, who says she worked so hard at drama school she didn’t have time for partying. She also found living with three girls quite a culture shock, as she grew up as the only girl in a household of seven children. “Growing up we used to watch a lot of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, and wear hand-me-down jeans and jumpers. I wasn’t really one for dresses and dolls and things,” she says. She’s still based in Pontypridd, where she grew up, and enjoys maximum anonymity. “No one remotely knows who I am here, it’s really funny,” she laughs. “I can go to the Hunky Dory premiere in Leicester Square, and it’s all amazing with Minnie Driver and cameras, then by the next lunchtime I’m home in Wales and no one knows who I am, no one cares.”
12 | Around Town Rhondda Cynon Taff |
www.aroundtownwales.co.uk
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