There’s something about Cameron.
When stunt to the celebs Kimberly Shannon Murphy she needed someone to interchange her—to lift her emotionally, which she needed, she turned to Cameron Diaz.
Originally from Oceanside, Illinois, she doubled for 20 years for superstars including Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Sandra Bullock, Blake Full of life and Diaz, whom she represented within the 2008 film What Happens in Vegas.
“On the time in my life I used to be 26 or so, I used to be still really struggling with quite a lot of demons and she or he was just someone who was pure light,” Murphy, 46, told The Post before releasing her May 16 diary “Glimmer: A Story of Survival, Hope, and Healing.”
“Just watching her gave me a lot hope… someone I used to be attempting to be… because she was just this amazing person.”
She is amongst the buddies Diaz invites to her home for what they call the “seven-hour salad,” where the actress dons a visor that claims “meat and grills.”
Murphy is so impressed with Diaz that she asked her to jot down the foreword to her book.
She even met her husband, a famous stuntman Casey O’Neillknown for doubling Tom Cruise when she understudied Diaz within the 2010 motion comedy Knight and Day.
She has worked on over 130 TV shows and films, from “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Captain America” to “The Hunger Games” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, for which she won the 2020 Taurus World Stunt Award for Best Fight.
sequence where fights Brad Pitt it took quite a lot of preparation before he smashes her head against the wall.
“We did three months of rehearsals for this scene,” she said.
The worst injury occurred on the set of Will Smith’s 2007 thriller I Am Legend.
“I feel I had about 80 stitches in my face,” she said. “It was … a high fall from the window …. You might be on a rope so it stops you 5 feet off the bottom. But my rappelling didn’t work and I fell straight to the bottom.”
Within the book, Murphy – who was 5’9″ and 125 kilos on the time – also reveals her bouts of bulimia.
Describing her first film set, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, wherein she doubled for Uma Thurman, she wrote, “I do not eat much … Uma is skinny as a reed and I want to seem like her.”
Besides jumping 6-meter fences and being tied to 30-meter ratchet ropes, keeping weight was a part of her job.
“You wish to work, you stay thin … it was very normal for me,” she said.
It also sheds light on the sexual abuse she suffered by the hands of her grandfather, and for this reason she needed to eliminate some relations from the narrative.
“I didn’t discuss my sisters… and that is because they do not support me in telling the story,” she explained.
Murphy spent her twenties living in a Bed-Stuy apartment with roommates – dancing on the bar mitzvah by day and taking ecstasy at Tribeca’s Club Shelter by night.
After the automobile accident, “the doctors said I would not dance anymore,” she recalled, she had to depart The Ailey School where she was a student.
She then auditioned for a Midtown strip club and didn’t get a performance.
“I used to be in deep trouble financially and just emotionally, not feeling good about myself,” she said. “I just didn’t feel like I saw a future for myself in any respect, so I used to be going to do whatever it took to survive.”
The course of her profession modified after she participated in a gaggle photo shoot for FHM, a now-defunct men’s magazine, wearing a thong.
“I remember being on the subway and seeing it on the stand and buying it,” she recalls. “I had my very own page and I used to be the just one who had it.”
Agents began to take notice of her, including George Aguilar, the town’s most famous stunt coordinator.
In 2010, she moved to Los Angeles, where she met O’Neill.
They’ve a 9-year-old daughter who Murphy refuses to follow in her fearless footsteps.
“The stunt world for women is just not something I actually need for my daughter. It is not a simple job.”