Making contact with Kelly Brook

10 April 2012

Kelly Brook belongs to that curious breed of celebrity, the modern, thick-skinned strain who believes that there is no such thing as bad publicity. When she was fired as co-presenter of The Big Breakfast, amid grumblings that she had strayed a little too far from the lingerie catalogue shoot, did she take it personally? Far from it. She post-rationalised away Channel 4's decision, pointing out that the knives were out from the start.

'You just get that feeling,' she says. 'I knew everyone loved Denise [Van Outen] and Johnny. I didn't in a million years think anyone was going to think I was as good as her because I was totally different. There was a lot of stuff that didn't quite work, and I don't think we really clicked in the right way.'

Neither did the rest of us. She sat next to Johnny Vaughan and, although she got exponentially better at pretending to get his jokes over the six months that she held down the job, she wasn't up to the task of being his feed. She was stumped by some of the longer words that cropped up on the Autocue, and broadsheets put it about that she needed phonetic spellings to get her through the show. So there was less surprise at the fact of her removal than the manner of it. She was on holiday in Gran Canaria with her Lock Stock bloke Jason Statham when she saw a tabloid headline: 'Kelly Axed'.

It sounds harsh, but Kelly says she wouldn't rewrite history, even if she could. 'No, not at all, because I came out of it good.' Then again, if it would stop people pitying her, she might. 'I don't like this whole sympathy thing. I don't want people to be sorry for me. To me, I'd prefer to be hated than felt sorry for.' So is there no such thing as bad publicity? 'Absolutely. Unless you're Anthea Turner or Gary Glitter or someone like that.' In other words, people beyond pity.

She bounced back. MTV picked her up, dusted her off and put her back in the saddle. (Who does satellite? Kelly doesn't seem to care.) Anyway, she thinks she's through with presenting and she won't be doing any more for MTV. Still, there's always the website to maintain - kellybrookonline.com - where you can read about her, find out what she's up to and buy her calendar.

This features 12 pictures of a frequently topless though never entirely frank Kelly. There's not a lot that Kelly doesn't know about nipple concealment. She's got a PhDD in it. She's shielded hers in all the boys' mags, in umpteen lingerie catalogues and campaigns. Only this summer she went to the premiere of Snatch wearing a sort of diagonally dangled postage stamp for which, after the concealment of the nipples, there wasn't quite enough material for the cladding of her left buttock. Designed by Julien Macdonald, it became the latest in a long line of dresses to be referred to by the overused term, That Dress.

'Oh God, I'm never going to live that down, that dress,' says Kelly. Which presumably was the point. She must have known it would adorn the front page of The Sun. 'You can never predict that, because you never know what's going to happen on that day. There could be some great war break out. It just so happens that with The Sun, there's a war and there's Kelly's bum hanging out, they put Kelly's bum hanging out, which to me is, like, I just can't get my head around that.'

But it's hardly a full-time job. So Kelly has decided to become an actress. She's just done a movie in Canada called Ripper in which she is killed, like everyone else, but not so early on that it isn't what Kelly unintentionally calls a 'lead slash supporting role'. There's nothing supporting about her next role. She's headlining in a play called Eye Contact, which is on at that frowningly serious arts venue, the Riverside Studios. It will be her theatrical debut. She doesn't seem to go to the theatre much - she mentions some charity rainforest thing at the Roundhouse that her boyfriend was in, and is about to see The Car Man (which is a ballet, Kelly) - so you sense that she might not know quite what she's letting herself in for. It could go either way. She may surprise us all like Anna Friel did on Broadway in Closer. Or she may suffer the same derision as Jerry Hall in The Graduate, who got bad reviews for her acting in the broadsheets and for her body in the tabloids.

But before we all roll our eyes and assume she was offered the part because of her publicity value, it isn't quite like that. She got her mitts on a script a year ago and begged to audition for it. She landed the role only after two actresses had turned it down. So what part was she so desperate to play? You've got one guess. Yup, she's playing a stripper. And yes, the part does stipulate garment removal.

The play is set in a lap-dancing club, and it examines the socio-cultural dynamic which draws dancers and droolers into its orbit. The author, Neil Monaghan, would no doubt tell us that it's quite a serious play, and the director, Izzy Mant, would back him up. There's the sleazy club owner, various clients, assorted strippers and there's Anya. She's the mouthy one, the ballsy one, the one who, in another life, might have ended up on, say, breakfast television. Anya plays a sort of chess game all night with a man who, against all the rules, fascinates her as much as she does him. Right at the climax of the play, he asks her to dance for him. Which, of course, means strip for him.

'The director says, "It's entirely up to you how far you want to take it." She understands my position that the media is going to be focusing on me taking my clothes off. They can come and watch the whole thing but the picture in the paper will be that one of me. It's gonna happen regardless. It's a strip club. So I think I'll probably have to take my dress off. At the end of the day I've got no problem with it. I've done stuff like that before.'

She researched it by hanging out in clubs in London and Canada. 'Anya knows what she does is looked down on by some people, but it's just a means to an end; she knows there's so much more out there for her, she knows that she's manipulating the guys. They haven't got the control over her. She's not just a bimbo going, "I just like the attention." She's doing it because she's getting paid good money and she's expressing herself. That's why it interested me.'

I assume the role rang bells. 'Absolutely. Where I drew from is the fact that I'd sometimes turn up to shoots for catalogues and ask to see the catalogue. One day I went to do a shoot and saw the girls there. You know when you have a feeling that something's not quite right? I said, "Can I have a look at the catalogue?" It was a bit of a shady one. I just walked up to the photographer and said, "Look, I'm really sorry, I think there's been a mistake, it wasn't what I thought it was." It wasn't like a pornographic shoot or anything like that. It was just at the dodgier end of the underwear world. Yes, I was a lingerie model but there was only a certain amount of lingerie work I would do.'

The other thing she can draw on is her training as a dancer. Kelly's tragedy is that she only ever really wanted to be a dancer. Growing up in Rochester, Kent, where Dad was a scaffolder and Mum something in supermarket ready-meals, she saw Fame on the telly. She wanted to wear the leg-warmers and do the kicks, and that's why she persuaded her parents to send her to the Italia Conti stage school in North London, the bootcamp for pop-chart trainees. The problem was it didn't pay, and somehow she got sucked into a whole different vortex.

'I was a dancer. Every day on the train home I used to go, "I can't believe I'm actually dancing." My nan used to always push me into modelling. She used to make me Victorian outfits every year for the Dickens festival and I used to go in for the costume contest which I won every year. She used to send my pictures off to competitions and I wasn't interested in being a model. I remember my mum used to say, "Go and get yourself some money." I was working in, like, a caf? for £2.50 an hour serving ice-creams. And then when I hadn't got any money I didn't have any other choice really. My sister was a model so it was always so easy for me to go up to an agency. I went in there, did it for a bit, earned my money and got out.'

What was the most she made an hour as a model? 'Ooh. Fifteen thousand, I think. It's ridiculous. I don't ever say models are dumb. I just think, good luck to yer. I know how much they're getting. I understand there's a market out there for stuff like calendars and I'd be silly not to cash in. I'll be doing that until I can start picking and choosing my acting roles.

'It's not my ambition to be the front cover of FHM, of course it's not. That's a bit shallow. It's my ambition to do the best film of all time, the best play.'

She was rescued from lingerie by The Big Breakfast. Right out of the frying pan they pulled her. If 16 is too young for a girl to be modelling lingerie, 18 was way too young for her to be thrown like a Christian to the lions into high-profile live television.

In retrospect, what can Planet 24 have been thinking? Now 20, you can tell how young she still is by the way she refers to something that happened a year ago as being 'ages ago'. She has been in Los Angeles this summer, staying with Vinnie Jones, and she and Statham didn't go out to bars and clubs partly because she isn't old enough to drink. When Kelly was asked at a press conference why she got The Big Breakfast job, she joked, 'There are two obvious reasons.' She may have a big smile and big brown eyes but I fear that may have been the size of it. Might her career have followed a different course if she'd been physically different?

'Of course, yeah. What would I be doing? Probably still dancing, probably doing extra work on films. I wouldn't have the luxury of going off to nice places and doing nice photoshoots and hair campaigns which I did for a couple of years.'

And then suddenly she blurts out, 'I wish I didn't have breasts. I wish they weren't so prominent. But it's just how I naturally am.' So would she consider having a breast reduction? 'No, obviously. It's me and that's how I am. That's how they are. There's nothing I can do about it. In everyday it's not even an issue. I wear baggy clothes.' She gestures to her (very baggy) sleeveless white jumper. 'Only every now and again will I wear something really fitted. It's only when I go out to posh dos that they're kind of on show and it just so happens that's when there's a million photographers around.'

They will be there for the first night of Eye Contact, too. Will she be nervous? 'Oh God, I'm going to be terrified. I'm just going to take a deep breath and go out and do it. I'd have done it in flipping Swansea because I think it's a brilliant play. The fact that it's never been done before means I can make it my own, rather than doing a Jerry Hall, stepping into someone else's shoes. I think that makes it twice as hard.' If it does flop, if she does a Jerry or a Daryl, at least it won't be because she wasn't as good as another woman.

MORE ABOUT

Actors And Actresses

Making contact with Kelly Brook

Read More