Hollywood stuntwoman Kimberly Shannon Murphy asks pal Cameron Diaz for help with her memoir
Kimberly Shannon Murphy needed someone to stand in for her — to give her the emotional lift she needed, she turned to Cameron Diaz.The Oceanside, LI native has enjoyed a 20-year career doubling for superstar actresses, including Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Sandra Bullock, Blake Lively and Diaz, for whom she stood in in 2008’s “What Happens in Vegas.”“At that time in my life, I was 26 or something, still really struggling with a lot of my demons and 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 so much hope … someone to strive to be … because she was just this incredible human.”She is among the 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 films, 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 into a wall, took a lot 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 think I had like 80 stitches in my face,” she said.