Lucy Davis on her battle with bulimia: 'A cycle of throwing up and starving was my solution'

Although she grew up with the Wonder Woman comics, Lucy Davis never realised that the American superheroine had a voluptuous blonde best friend. Until, that is, she was asked to play Etta Candy in this year’s big-screen remake.

“I’d been the girl, aged about 10, who’d twirl around her bedroom each night in the hope of waking up the following morning, having been transformed into Wonder Woman,” she says.

These days, Davis – who made her name playing Dawn in The Office – is happy to play the role of comely sidekick, whose battle cry is: “For the love of chocolate…”

I would diet for a week, then eat all the food I hadn’t consumed in the previous seven days in a single day

Lucy Davis

And, in truth, Lucy is more rounded now than when she played the daydreaming office girl in Ricky Gervais’s award-winning sitcom. “I wouldn’t deny it,” she says. “But I haven’t changed a pound in weight for over three years now. Although it’s true what they say about the camera: it can put a good 10lbs on you.”

Davis doesn’t diet anymore. “I came to the realisation, rather late in the day, that whatever your body’s meant to be, it will figure itself out. I’m 44 now, and it’s been a journey.

“In my 30s, I would have hated to look like this. I probably wouldn’t have gone out much. I’d diet for a week and then eat all the food I hadn’t consumed in the previous seven days in a single day.” At one point, she even enrolled with Overeaters Anonymous.

“Now, I think I’m just normal. But my head didn’t think that then. This period of binge and purge was at its worst when my marriage came to an end. Even today, I’ll wonder sometimes whether I might try and shift a few pounds, and then I’ll think: ‘Ooh no, I’d love some cheese.’

“I came to realise that all eating disorders aren’t essentially about what you look like. They’re about something much more fundamental. Like any addiction, I suppose. It’s not that you have a drink problem, for example; it’s that you have a problem, which is why you drink. For me, a cycle of throwing up and starving was my solution.”

Solihull-born Davis moved to Hollywood in the early noughties after The Office finished, and in 2006 married fellow actor Owain Yeoman in St Paul’s Cathedral (she’s the daughter of comedian Jasper Carrott, whose OBE entitled her to marry there). However, the couple divorced after five years – yet she still refuses to talk about the failure of her marriage.

“And I never will, for the simple reason that it involves someone else, and I don’t think that would be the right thing to do.” However, she does say that she doesn’t know where Yeoman is – and clearly, one guesses, she has no plans to find out.

Davis first came to LA in 2004 when The Office was nominated (successfully) for two Golden Globes. “I stayed in a smart hotel and was whisked around in fancy limousines. So I decided to come back and see if I could get some work. It was horrible. I cried almost solidly for three weeks. If I could have found my way to the airport, I’d have come home.”

But she stuck it out. When her marriage failed, she also dug in, rather than running back to the sanctuary of the familial womb. “Anyway, by then I had Gracie” [a soppy, sweet-faced black cocker spaniel lying on the sofa at her side in the elegant LA apartment where we have met]. “I couldn’t have put her in a crate and flown her back to the UK.”

Until her role in Wonder Woman – one of the most successful films of 2017, taking almost a billion dollars at the box office, and which will doubtless return for a sequel – the acting work down the years has been a bit spotty. “I did quite a lot of figuring out what I’d do if I wasn’t an actor,” she says. One of her chosen alternatives was to get involved in something called reconnective healing, a hands-off therapy that claims to re-connect the body with its “universal life force”. 

“But it’s not a modality or a method, it’s not a treatment or a therapy,” she says by way of explanation. “It doesn’t diagnose, and the practitioner’s hands have no need to physically touch the client.” What it is all to do with, apparently, is accessing a comprehensive spectrum of frequencies that live in a scientific field that we’re all part of. She has since built up a solid base of clients in California: “I must have seen up to 600 people now,” she says.

Davis, noticing that my eyebrowns have raised, understands that people unfamiliar with the alternative therapy are often sceptical. It was her younger sister, Hannah, a practitioner in the UK, who helped Lucy on to a five-day course in Miami – and she got to test it out on the plane back to LA.

Davis was sat next to a man in his 60s who had Parkinson’s and walked with two sticks. Halfway through the flight, he put his head in his hands and started to moan. “When I asked if I could do anything, he explained that he suffered from severe headaches which could last for up to six days.

“So – quite unlike me – I said I’d just been on a healing course. I then asked him to hold out his hand and I circled my own hands around it without touching him. He felt nothing, he said. Twenty minutes later, I asked him how he was doing. He looked at me. ‘The pain,’ he said, ‘it’s gone.’ Then I watched as he got up without asking for help from two stewards and walked himself to the toilet.”

The only blot on her landscape at the moment is the health of her stand-up comedian father (whose real name is Bob Davis), who has heart problems and is due to have a bypass, which has necessitated postponing his upcoming tour. “Dad’s very like me in that we don’t like to make a drama out of a crisis. I phone home every day. This is the one downside of living so far apart.”

She’s had her own health issues. In 1993, a routine medical before she started work on a production of Pride and Prejudice revealed she was suffering from kidney failure. Her mother, Hazel, donated one of her own kidneys to her eldest daughter. Lucy has always been very reluctant to talk about this. Why?

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s quite magical what Mum did for me. But when I was told I’d need a transplant, be on medication for the rest of my life and that the kidney probably wouldn’t last much longer than about seven years, I made up my mind to get on with my life. I was 20 then – the transplant happened four years later – and I couldn’t bear to be thought of as the ‘ill person’.

“Very lovely people would suddenly stop talking when I walked into a room and then ask me: ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ They meant well, but I hated being defined by my condition. Now, here I am, 20 years later and I’m fine, although the medication has made me diabetic so, even if I wanted children, and I don’t, it’s less than likely to happen.”

She holds up a hand. “But I have no desire to talk about the things in my life that aren’t wanted. I only want to talk about the things that I love. I have so much I want to celebrate and that,” says Davis, firmly, “is what I choose to concentrate on.”

Wonder Woman is out now on DVD