There’s something about Cameron.
When stuntwoman to the celebs Kimberly Shannon Murphy needed someone to face in for her — to present her the emotional lift she needed, she turned to Cameron Diaz.
The Oceanside, LI native has enjoyed a 20-year profession doubling for superstar actresses, including Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Sandra Bullock, Blake Vigorous and Diaz, for whom she stood in in 2008’s “What Happens in Vegas.”
“At the moment in my life, I used to be 26 or something, still really fighting a number of my demons and he or she was just someone who was a pure light,” Murphy, 46, told The Post ahead of the May 16 release of her memoir “Glimmer: A Story of Survival, Hope, and Healing.”
“Just watching her gave me a lot hope … someone to strive to be … because she was just this incredible human.”
She is among the many pals Diaz invites to her house for what they call a “seven-hour salad,” where the actress dons a visor emblazoned with the word meat and barbecues.
Murphy is so in awe of Diaz, that she asked her to pen the foreward to her book.
She even met her husband, famed stuntman Casey O’Neill, known to double for Tom Cruise, when she was doubling for Diaz on the 2010 action-comedy “Knight and Day.”
She has worked in over 130 TV shows and movies, from “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Captain America” to “Hunger Games” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” for which she won a 2020 Taurus World Stunt Award for Best Fight.
The sequence, where she tackles Brad Pitt before he smashes her head right into a wall, took a number of prep.
“We did three months of rehearsals for that scene,” she said.
Her worst injury was on the set of the 2007 Will Smith thriller “I Am Legend.”
“I believe I had like 80 stitches in my face,” she said. “It was . . . a high fall out a window. . . . You’re on a line, so it stops you 5 feet above the bottom. But my descender didn’t work and I went straight to the bottom.”
Within the book, Murphy — who was then 5’9” and 125 kilos — also reveals her bouts with bulimia.
While describing her first movie set “My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” where she doubled for Uma Thurman, she wrote, “I’m not eating much … Uma’s as thin as a reed, and I would like to appear to be her.”
Besides hopping 6-foot fences and being tied to 30-foot ratchet cables, maintaining her weight was a part of her job.
“You must work, you stay skinny … it was something that was very just normal to me,” she said.
She also sheds light on the sexual abuse she suffered by the hands of her grandfather, and needed to eliminate certain members of the family from the narrative due to it.
“I didn’t talk about my sisters … and that was because they are usually not supportive of me telling the story,” she explained.
Murphy spent her early 20s living in a Bed-Stuy apartment with roommates — dancing at bar mitzvahs by day and taking ecstasy at Tribeca’s Club Shelter at night.
After a automobile accident, “doctors said I wouldn’t dance again,” she recalled, she had to go away The Ailey School, where she was a student.
She then auditioned for a Midtown strip club and didn’t get the gig.
“I used to be in dire straits financially and just emotionally not feeling good about myself,” she said. “I just didn’t really feel like I saw a future for myself in any respect so was just going to do anything to survive.”
The course of her profession modified after she participated in a bunch photoshoot for FHM, the now defunct men’s magazine, in a thong.
“I remember being within the subway and seeing it on the stand and buying it,” she recalled. “I had my very own page and I used to be the one one which did.”
Agents began to notice her, including George Aguilar, essentially the most well-known stunt coordinator in town.
In 2010 she moved to L.A., where she met O’Neill.
They’ve a 9-year-old daughter, who Murphy doesn’t want following in her fearless footsteps.
“The stunt world for girls is just not something that I really need for my daughter. It’s not a simple job.”
