Julia Davis

The Art of Making You Cringe

Julia Davis doesn't ask you to like her. On British television at the turn of the century, her name was synonymous with a physical discomfort that made viewers look away from the screen. She started out on the alternative comedy circuit in Bath and soon moved into radio.

But her collaboration with Chris Morris on Jam in 2000 is what laid the foundation for her style. That show was a feverish nightmare filmed with strange filters and overly long silences. Davis realized there that the most powerful laughter comes from everyday horror.

In 2004, she wrote and starred in Nighty Night. Jill Tyrell, her character, is a sociopath in gym tights who fakes her husband's terminal illness to seduce the neighbor.

Humor built on pure cruelty.

The show avoided conventional jokes to focus on humiliation. Davis prefers to explore human misery rather than chase the easy applause of the audience.

The Dictatorship of Discomfort

And the gamble paid off.

Davis moved away from modern aesthetics to shoot Hunderby in 2012. She won two BAFTA awards for this gothic parody, where the dialogue sounds like a Jane Austen novel written under the influence of some hallucinogen. The production stood out for its suffocating costume design that reflected the repression of its characters.

In 2016, she premiered Camping. The series ran for just six episodes, but it was enough for HBO to acquire the rights to an American remake. That American version of 2018 never matched the sharp edge of the original British show.

Sally4Ever won the Best Comedy award at the 2019 BAFTA Awards. The story explores toxic obsession and sex in such an explicit way that critics called it a necessary shock to the system. Davis plays an artist who invades the life of a gray woman until she completely destroys her.

She played Maureen in The Trouble with Maggie Cole during 2020. In 2022, she joined the cast of The Curse as Big Mick in a story about bungled robberies set in the 1980s.

Davis runs her own production company.

During 2023, she took part in the third season of The Morning Show, playing Alex Nelson. Filming of her scenes took place at studios in Los Angeles under the technical direction of Mimi Leder, and the contract included specific clauses on intellectual property for her improvised dialogue. The budget per episode of this production exceeded fifteen million dollars.