Lucy Davis Interview

Lucy Davis first caught the attention of the populace with her role as Dawn in the hugely successful comedy, The Office.
Since then she’s made numerous appearances in film and television, even getting her hands a dirty (or bloody) with a lead role in Shaun of the Dead.

Now living in the US, Lucy is involving herself in some exciting projects including the excellent horror comedy Some Guy Who Kills People, which is out this week.
We caught up with her to discuss the film, dating suspected psychopaths and dogs in human clothes.

LH: I notice that you’re doing a lot of TV at the moment Lucy Davis Interviewas opposed to film. Is there any particular reason behind that?

Lucy Davis: No, those are just the jobs that I’ve been offered recently.

So are you spending a lot of time in the US at the moment?

Yeah, I live there now and I don’t have my place in London anymore. I live in Larchmont Village in LA and I don’t have plans to not live there, or to live there… I need to make some plans!

What was it then that drew you to some guy who kills people?

The script. I just really love how Ryan Levine writes. He’s quite dark, he’s very subtle and when I was reading it and got the role, I was thinking ‘please, please let this be how I hope it is’. And it was. Especially when Barry Bostwick got cast as the sheriff. He was fabulous I thought, and was just the way I imagined the sheriff to be.

When I watched the film I could tell that the cast had a real synergy. Was that both on and off the screen?

It was, and I think also when you do a low budget, independent film, you do it for the love of it. You definitely don’t do it for the money. So we’re all in it because we have faith in this script, we like what we’re doing and we’re just enjoying it. Everyone’s pulling together to make it work.

Your character came very naturally to you. Have you dated many suspected psychopaths in the past?

(Laughs) All of them!

They all have been? Or you’ve dated every psychopath?!

I should retract that first bit. To my knowledge, Some Guy Who Kills PeopleI don’t think any of them have been psychopaths, so no.
I think Stephanie in the film, she’s quite normal and I think that when she comes across tense, like with the ice cream… (Laughs) when filming I said ‘I’m sorry, I’m probably going to be your most unsupportive member of cast today. I can’t stop laughing. With his sad, forlorn little face in that costume. It was very good I thought. What I loved is when I saw it, they’d purposefully made it into the saddest ice cream cone you could possibly imagine.

He is one depressed looking ice cream…
Changing subject slightly, are you a horror lover?

I would say that horror is probably my favourite genre of film. Love it.

So what’s your favourite film?

I think probably The Shining would be my favourite. I don’t love flashy horrors. You know, when it’s silent for a minute, then someone bangs a drum. Yes, I’m going to jump at that. Not because it’s horror, but because it’s a loud noise.
But I love things to do with the mind. Psychological horrors.
I do quite like being scared.

So you’re going to be in America for Halloween. Have you got anything spooky planned?

I do tend to get a load of candy and put it out for kids. I don’t decorate my house Halloweeney, so I’m probably a bit ‘bah humbug’. I don’t dress up my animal for it.
Although one year as everyone was getting into the Halloween mood I thought ‘I’d better be a bit less bah humbug’ and I bought a spider costume that’s meant to be for dogs. I’m fundamentally against dressing dogs in human clothes but I thought it could be quite funny.
I put it on. She was outraged.
She couldn’t have looked more offended. And she basically wriggled until she’d bitten it off.

Lucy Davis Some Guy Who Kills People

And what’s next for you Lucy?

Well I just got back from Guadalupe in the Caribbean. I was doing Death in Paradise, the Ben Miller BBC thing. So that was actually just really good fun.
My agent said ‘you’ve been offered a job in the Caribbean’ and I said ‘YES’. She said ‘do you not want to know what it is?’ I said ‘not if it’s going to put me off’.
And I’ve just written a pilot for a single camera, half hour comedy and I’m just in the process of pitching it.
I really loved doing it. I really loved doing the writing thing and I was delighted in myself for filling thirty pages of words.

It’s a family comedy set in Santa Monica, LA. But I’m also currently rewriting it so that it can be set in Brighton too.

You can catch Lucy in Some Guy Who Kills People which is released in cinemas 5 October and DVD, Blu-ray, download and on demand on 15 October 2012

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Tom Atkinson

Tom is one of the editors at Love Horror. He has been watching horror for a worryingly long time, starting on the Universal Monsters and progressing through the Carpenter classics. He has a soft-spot for eighties horror.More

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