Australian actress took a leap of faith with "Jumpers"

NEW YORK -- Most actresses would simply leap at the chance to make a splash in a Tom Stoppard play. Most would do cartwheels for a shot at a meaty role that could lead to a Tony Award nomination.

Most actresses clearly aren't Essie Davis.

Handed the script for "Jumpers," the Australian-born Davis paged through the dense play and had two questions: First, what was all the fuss about? And second, why exactly should she do it?

"I thought it was kind of boring, impenetrable, very dated, really not funny and not my sense of humor," she says. "I cannot say that 'Jumpers' was a real page-turner. I really wasn't very interested in it."

Persuaded to dive back in, Davis gave it a second chance. What it yielded was a best supporting actress Tony nod and breathless reviews for her Broadway debut.

The Associated Press dubbed her "a comic delight," the New Yorker magazine said she "exudes a sumptuous sexuality, full of playfulness and longing," and The New York Times said simply: "Essie Davis is divine."

What caused Davis to go back to Stoppard and earn those reviews? She credits a meeting with director David Leveaux for showing her that "Jumpers" was full of striving, hope and joy, and love unfulfilled.

"The way he talked about the play was so completely different to the play that I'd read and his insight into it was incredibly passionate and very gentle. He believed that it had this fragile heart at the center of it," she says.

"And I thought, 'Well, we've read very different plays.' He spoke about it with such passion and love that it really just turned me around. The next time I read it, I read it with his eyes."

Stoppard's play centers on the strained relationship between George, a long-winded professor of moral philosophy preparing a hefty lecture on man's relationship to God, and his wife Dottie, who is struggling through a nervous breakdown.

"Ultimately, Dottie sums up the whole play in 10 lines almost. She encapsulates everything that George says in tiny little paragraphs here and there," Davis says. "I think she is actually Tom's message in the play."

Opposite Simon Russell Beale, Davis offers the same nuanced portrayal that won her a Laurence Olivier award in London as Stella in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and rave reviews as Vermeer's somewhat bewildered wife in the film "Girl With a Pearl Earring."

The former caught the attention of Leveaux, who suspected he'd found in Davis his Dottie. He needed an actress who could appreciate the ambiguities of a powerful script and find meaning beyond its language.

"She's ancient and modern. She can utter a completely contemporary line and give you access to hundreds of years of history behind it. Not all fine actors can do those two things," he says. "It does have the effect of making quite ordinary aspects of language in her hands develop tremendous voltage."

Davis, who ambles unrecognized with swept-up blond hair through a busy Times Square in flip-flops and a green and pink sun dress, sports high, cherubic cheekbones, dangling earrings and sunglasses.

Her cramped dressing room in the Brooks Atkinson Theatre has been remade into a cozy hideaway: Candles burn, new red curtains hang and soft Brazilian music issues from a CD player. She laughs hard and often, making an explosive and infectious rat-a-tat.

It is Davis whose image -- photographed sitting cross-legged on a half moon in a pretty dress -- has become the icon of the play, showing up on the Playbill cover and adorning the theater's doors, a fact that somewhat bothers the 30-something star.

"Oh, my God. How embarrassing," she says. "I find it quite difficult to look at." She describes the stern-looking image of her staring out at the audience with a frosty expression on her lips, "my Hitler Youth pose."

Davis has been doing Dottie for a long time now, having begun the role in London's Royal National Theatre and then on the West End. So far, her Broadway debut -- complete with Tony nomination -- has gone better than she had hoped.

"I know that it's not this easy all the time," she says. "But I know how hard I've worked and I might not have worked here before but I have in Australia for a long time. I've earned my stripes, and I'm just blown away that I'm getting them here."

It might not have happened if not for the encouragement of an unlikely source. Davis, who got work straight out of the National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sidney, was billed as "the next big thing" in Australian theater and began thinking of an international career.

Then along came Glenn Close. The American actress was producing an independent film when she came across Davis' videotaped audition and dashed off an e-mail to the Australian saying the performance had moved her to tears.

Told to wait by the phone one day to find out if she'd landed the part, Davis paced and nervously drank tea for hours, generally freaking out: "Oh my God, Glenn Close is going to phone me!" she recalls saying over and over.

Close, though, never called. It turned out that financing for her film had fallen through, dashing Davis' hope to make a splash in more than just Australia. But the young actress, who had treasured Close's letter, didn't give up.

"I sort of stole her e-mail address off it and wrote her a letter saying that I was sorry she lost her funding and that if she ever got it, would she please consider me again. I told her I was going to London to try my luck and maybe even America and did she have any advice?

"She wrote back 11 hours later! It was friendliest, most beautiful e-mail. She said, 'I'll never forget you and, by the way, I'm playing Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire" in London and I know they haven't cast Stella yet, so come get yourself an audition."'

She did, got it and her career took off, leading to "Jumpers," as well as the small part of Maggie in the last two "Matrix" movies and the upcoming "Code 46" opposite Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton.

"Everything sort of went, 'Whoosh!"' Davis says.

After "Jumpers," she wants to concentrate on film. "I like a story that moves you. I like something that can potentially change the way you think or feel," says Davis, who is married to filmmaker Justin Kurzel.

Playing Dottie has been exhausting, she says, and not just because it's emotionally wrenching. There's also the fact that she sings and bares her naked body eight times a week.

This from a woman who concedes that she was so shy as the lead singer of a rock band while in her teens that she often hid behind the rest of the musicians.

But when Davis committed to "Jumpers," she knew Dottie had to show more than she wanted. Even when Stoppard himself told her that only a glimpse of her backside would be necessary, David objected.

"I'm not a big fan of nudity on stage because I think quite a lot of the time people just stop listening and just look," she says. "But in this I don't feel that's the case. I feel like it's part of the story. It's very confronting to do -- particularly if you're not having a good hair day!"