‘I’m the least cool person you will ever meet’
Pontypridd-raised Kimberley Nixon has come a long way since appearing on our screens as a fresh-faced 21-year-old in Cranford. But one thing hasn’t changed – she’s still refreshingly down to earth, as Laura Clements discovers...
FOR someone who’s never really had a plan for her acting career, Kimberley Nixon hasn’t done too badly. In the notoriously fickle world of film and TV, Kim has popped up on our screens every year since she made her debut as Sophy Hutton alongside Dame Judi Dench in Cranford in 2007.
Back then she was a fresh-faced 21-year-old straight out of Cardiff’s Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama.
Today, aged 36 and with the slightly flustered look that comes with being a new mum, Kim has just wrapped the latest series of The Tuckers.
She’s managed to slip into Milk & Sugar in Cardiff ’s Central Square unnoticed by the office workers earnestly going about their business on a grey and blustery Thursday.
If anyone does look up and catch sight of her, they could be forgiven for letting their eyes linger for a few seconds as they try to place her distinctly familiar face. It used to happen more often, Kim says, people coming up to ask her where they know her from.
There’s no denying her delicate features make her look younger than her years and playing teenage girls certainly only reinforced that.
“The problem was I was really young,” she says about her early roles. “I wasn’t old enough to play someone’s mum.”
Anyone who was a teenage girl in 2008 would remember her as Lindsay in her first film – Angus, Thongs And Perfect Snogging.
“Ten years later they come up to me and ask if I’m ‘slaggy Lindsay’,” Kim laughs. If her dad happens to be with her when fans approach, she has to reassure him they aren’t insulting her. “It has to be in context,” she added. “They know they know me, but not why.”
And then there was Channel Four’s Fresh Meat, the milestone university comedy from Peep Show creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, which introduced the world to Kim’s character Josie and her housemates Oregon (Charlotte Ritchie), Vod (Zawe Ashton), JP (Jack Whitehall), Howard (Greg McHugh) and Kingsley (Joe Thomas). Kim played Josie for all four series between 2011 and 2016.
Millions tuned in to watch these six polar opposites arrive at their shabby house-share at the fictional Manchester Medlock University. Very quickly the show morphed into a painfully funny story about the highs (young love, weekday benders) and rocky lows (debt, drug abuse) of student life. But the on-screen friendships were almost as strong as the real-life ones.
“They were a really special group of people,” says Kim about her fellow actors. They still have a WhatsApp group chat going on and update each other on their lives. It was inevitable really, as the cast worked 12-hour days living and working in the same house in Manchester for a five-month stint of filming.
“Filming Fresh Meat was my university,” says Kim. “It did set me up for the business.” It was her first foray into comedy and she admits she only really said yes because she loved Peep Show.
Just as their characters experienced key life changes together, so they did in real life. Zawe would go on to read a poem at Kim’s wedding in 2014 to husband Cai Howells, a former filmmaker turned garden designer. They’ve since had a baby son, who’s just turned one.
The six main cast members have all continued getting big acting jobs. Kim went on to star alongside Matthew Perry in Sky Arts film The Dog Thrower and also had a leading role in Sky’s now-cancelled medical drama Critical, as well as starring in Channel 4’s The Accident with Sarah Lancashire and stage and radio play Original Death Rabbit.
As well as acting, Kim was the voiceover on BBC Three series The Call Centre and won an episode of Celebrity Mastermind with the specialist subject of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels.
Most recently she has appeared in Ordinary Lies, Death In Paradise and ITV drama The Salisbury Poisonings. Fresh Meat was the “lynchpin” of that subsequent success, she added.
Life as a professional actress sounds pretty glamorous, I suggest, to which Kim laughs off such an absurd idea. She has spoken before about dropping in on fellow actress Jessica Biel whenever she happens to be in Los Angeles. And there was that time she popped round to Justin Timberlake’s house for a 1920s-themed evening.
But Kim has always kept a low profile, despite the best efforts of the tabloids to create a hint of scandal. There was one time the Daily Mail went to town reporting how she’d been seen cavorting with Harry Potter star Rupert Grint in between takes for her gritty 2009 film Cherrybomb.
He’d been “spotted” drinking with her in VIP clubs and spending time in her supposed north London home. The photographic evidence of this scandalous behaviour was of Kim and Rupert together, but was in fact a cropped picture of the entire crew bowling to celebrate the end of filming.
“I just thought, ‘Wow, if that’s my life, that’s awesome’,” says Kim. “It did spook me into how things can be made to look.”
In reality, Kim would rather put on her dungarees and walking boots and head to the Welsh hills with her dog.
“I’m the least cool person you will ever meet,” she says. “I’m very uncomfortable all dolled up.”
She adds: “It’s all pretend,” sighing with sadness that the younger generation see all that on social media and assume it’s normal life.
She continues: “Social media gives you access to people and you can say things you will never say in person. I’m not Josie from Fresh Meat. I’m a whole other person with a life – you don’t know anything about me.” But she adds quickly: “I do understand – I love TV myself.”
Real life for Kim hits when she comes off the M4 at junction 32 and catches a glimpse of her beloved hometown of Pontypridd. She lives above Pontypridd with views right down the valley.
“I come home and no-one cares,” she says about her other starry life. “I can just pop down to Prince’s for coffee – it’s absolutely brilliant.”
Did she ever think a girl from Ponty would achieve such a career trajectory, I ask?
“Some actors say they have a grand plan, but how can that possibly be?” she replies earnestly. “I have no idea what’s in the work. This time next year I could be in Australia for a film that’s still in the works.”
As for how she chooses her roles, there’s really no science in it whatsoever, no matter what actors might say, she says: “That’s where your agent comes in and you work hard.”
Kim is refreshingly down to earth about the realities of being an actress. There are thousands of auditions and they increasingly demand self-tapes, she says, which are particularly excruciating.
She laughs that, having spent several long cold days hanging out in a car park in Swansea for her latest project, the most exciting part is often talking about the catering.
“Any actor you speak to thinks about giving up the business at least every three months,” she says. “But then their agent calls and they get on with the next project.”
She half-jokes: “I dream of a proper nine-to-five all the time. But the only discernible skill I have is
that I can pretend well.” She’s underselling her talents – in 2017 she picked up the Bafta Cymru Award for best actress for her role in Ordinary Lies.
She’s had two “giant wobbles” in her career and says they tend to come after a period of not working.
“I like to work because that’s part of my self-worth. I’d gone 18 months and then there’s the money stress and low self-esteem that comes with that. You find yourself going into auditions with desperation and that comes across in your acting.
“I’ve found that I’ve got jobs when I’m already working.”
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, which stalled a lot of film and TV projects, it’s been a productive couple of years for Kim – partly because she “made a human” and also because she was able to pick up filming of The Tuckers after he was born.
Filming the BBC show was a mad dash to make the most of Covid restrictions being lifted and capitalising on having everyone together at the same time. It meant Kim was able to film her part in the first episode in series two and the sixth episode in series three. And she was never far from home – although she’s the first to admit she hadn’t realised just how exhausting a filming regime would be with a baby at home.
It means there’s a colour-coded scheduled pinned up on their fridge at home and Bampi Andrew (Kim’s proud dad) is willingly on hand to fill in when he can.
Kim knows that, being the “wrong” side of 30, she’s classed as “old” in the industry, but thinks there’s been a “huge shift” in the way women in their 40s and 50s are represented in drama. She lists Nicola Walker in Unforgotten and Suranne Jones in Vigil as role models and she is hopeful it’s a permanent change. Even so, she’s still pretty philosophical.
“I’m a huge worrier, but when it comes to my job I just can’t – there’s no point,” she says.
The best bit of advice she ever had was from her dad – she’s always paid half of her salary into an account she wouldn’t touch so in the times she wasn’t working she’d have a little nest egg to see her through.
“If I didn’t have that then I would have had to get a job,” she says. “Many actors fall out of the job because of that need to live. Dad made me do it. It’s a cushion.”
It helps, of course, that life in Pontypridd is considerably cheaper than central London. But even that couldn’t protect her from the student debt she had coming out of drama school and she wryly remembers asking the team at Cranford for a £200 advance to cover her costs between filming.
Life in the capital city comes with the “constant attrition on your selfworth” as well, she says. “In London you have to project this image which is just insincere and exhausting.”
Filming for the likes of Wild Child, a 2008 teen comedy film directed by Nick Moore, gave her an insight into the “insane world” that can exist.
“We had this house in Malibu complete with an infinity pool, people doing my hair and make-up – that was a weird bubble. I had to remind myself this wasn’t the real world.”
And there was a surreal 24 hours when she had a call from her manager in LA to head straight over to meet Denzel Washington: “You send the self-tape into the ether and then just wait. I got a call saying Denzel watched my tape and really liked it and wanted me to fly out to LA to do a chemistry read.
“I was like, ‘Denzel Washington? That’s not funny, shut up’.” But, finally convinced her manager was serious, she flew out to the States, rocking up straight from Pontypridd into a room with Denzel, bleary-eyed and jetlagged. In the end the part went to Mila Kunis.
“That was weird, surreal, entering that bubble and then back to real life with a bump,” Kim says ruefully.
The job everyone really wants is, perhaps surprisingly, Death In Paradise, the BBC drama filmed in the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. It was Sian Gibson who told Kim: “If they ever ask you, it’s brilliant stuff.”
Fortuitously, Kim landed a role playing Catrina McVey in 2019 which took her and her husband out to the island, which is known for its long beaches and sugar cane plantations.
“They’re really accommodating for families,” Kim explains about the attraction. She was out there for 10 days but was only required for filming for two-and-a-half days. She spent her downtime on the island exploring beautiful beaches and rainforests.
“All I could think was, ‘This makes up for every car park in Slough’,” she laughs, without a shred of guilt. “If Death In Paradise was filmed in Birmingham then I doubt it would be quite so popular.”
For now there are a couple of small films on the go for Kim, which will no doubt involve more car parks and drinking bad coffee from polystyrene cups in the half-light.