There’s one thing about Cameron.
When stuntwoman to the celebs Kimberly Shannon Murphy wanted somebody to face in for her — to provide her the emotional carry she wanted, she turned to Cameron Diaz.
The Oceanside, LI native has loved a 20-year profession doubling for celebrity actresses, together with Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Sandra Bullock, Blake Vigorous and Diaz, for whom she stood in in 2008’s “What Occurs in Vegas.”
“At the moment in my life, I used to be 26 or one thing, nonetheless actually battling a whole lot of my demons and he or she was simply somebody who was a pure gentle,” Murphy, 46, instructed The Put up forward of the Could 16 launch of her memoir “Glimmer: A Story of Survival, Hope, and Therapeutic.”
“Simply watching her gave me a lot hope … somebody to attempt to be … as a result of she was simply this unimaginable human.”
She is among the many friends Diaz invitations to her home for what they name a “seven-hour salad,” the place the actress dons a visor emblazoned with the phrase meat and barbecues.
Murphy is so in awe of Diaz, that she requested her to pen the foreward to her e book.
She even met her husband, famed stuntman Casey O’Neill, recognized to double for Tom Cruise, when she was doubling for Diaz on the 2010 action-comedy “Knight and Day.”
She has labored in over 130 TV reveals and movies, from “Prime Gun: Maverick” and “Captain America” to “Starvation Video games” and “As soon as Upon a Time in Hollywood,” for which she received a 2020 Taurus World Stunt Award for Greatest Combat.
The sequence, the place she tackles Brad Pitt earlier than he smashes her head right into a wall, took a whole lot of prep.
“We did three months of rehearsals for that scene,” she mentioned.
Her worst harm was on the set of the 2007 Will Smith thriller “I Am Legend.”
“I believe I had like 80 stitches in my face,” she mentioned. “It was . . . a excessive fall out a window. . . . You’re on a line, so it stops you 5 ft above the bottom. However my descender didn’t work and I went straight to the bottom.”
Within the e book, Murphy — who was then 5’9” and 125 kilos — additionally reveals her bouts with bulimia.
Whereas describing her first film set “My Tremendous Ex-Girlfriend,” the place she doubled for Uma Thurman, she wrote, “I’m not consuming a lot … Uma’s as skinny as a reed, and I have to seem like her.”
In addition to hopping 6-foot fences and being tied to 30-foot ratchet cables, sustaining her weight was a part of her job.
“You wish to work, you keep skinny … it was one thing that was very simply regular to me,” she mentioned.
She additionally sheds gentle on the sexual abuse she suffered by the hands of her grandfather, and needed to eradicate sure relations from the narrative due to it.
“I didn’t discuss my sisters … and that was as a result of they don’t seem to be supportive of me telling the story,” she defined.
Murphy spent her early 20s residing in a Mattress-Stuy house with roommates — dancing at bar mitzvahs by day and taking ecstasy at Tribeca’s Membership Shelter at night time.
After a automobile accident, “medical doctors mentioned I wouldn’t dance once more,” she recalled, she needed to go away The Ailey College, the place she was a pupil.
She then auditioned for a Midtown strip membership and didn’t get the gig.
“I used to be in dire straits financially and simply emotionally not feeling good about myself,” she mentioned. “I simply didn’t actually really feel like I noticed a future for myself in any respect so was simply going to do something to outlive.”
The course of her profession modified after she participated in a bunch photoshoot for FHM, the now defunct males’s journal, in a thong.
“I keep in mind being within the subway and seeing it on the stand and shopping for it,” she recalled. “I had my very own web page and I used to be the one one which did.”
Brokers began to note her, together with George Aguilar, probably the most well-known stunt coordinator within the metropolis.
In 2010 she moved to L.A., the place she met O’Neill.
They’ve a 9-year-old daughter, who Murphy doesn’t need following in her fearless footsteps.
“The stunt world for girls isn’t one thing that I actually need for my daughter. It’s not a straightforward job.”