She started out performing in her living room, charging £1.50 a ticket. Now, having blazed through Love Island and silenced her Strictly haters, the Welsh sensation is really hitting the big time
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t 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.
