Standing at the shop counter, Ambrosine Davies’ mind whirred incessantly. She’d grown up in an idyllic village in the Essex countryside – so how had she ended up on the verge of buying a handgun in Los Angeles?
It wasn’t the first time Ambrosine had swapped the UK for the US. In her twenties, she’d enjoyed a wild time living in New York until her visa ran out. But she returned in 2016, keen to study improvisation and sketch comedy theatre at The Groundlings Theatre and School in LA, which helped launch the careers of Will Ferrell and Maya Rudolph.
Instantly, Ambrosine fell in love with the place.
‘When people arrive in LA for the first time, they tend not to like it. It seems superficial, you have to drive everywhere, and it’s hot and expensive. But I discovered there are neighbourhoods where you find your people and the nature is amazing,’ she tells Metro over zoom from her London home.
‘It was the mountains, the beaches, the opportunities… the sense that anything is possible. You constantly see stars around. I remember crouching down in a store, and next to me will.i.am was also looking at pickles. Another time I was at the checkout in Gelsons [the US equivalent to Waitrose] with Angelina Jolie and I thought how weird it was that she was just there.’
However, Ambrosine also discovered that alongside the sunshine and celebrities, LA was home to a ‘very dark underbelly’ of people dogged by addiction and intoxicated by the lure of fame.
‘When you try to meet new friends, you soon realise that everybody’s using you for something. Finding genuine connections can be hard’, she explains. Like the actor she spent a day with helping to learn lines who ditched Ambrosine immediately after she got the part, or her upstairs neighbour who seemed friendly, until she realised he was a stalker who had hired a private detective on his therapist.
‘It was never dull,’ she says simply.
After a couple of years in LA, Ambrosine was propping herself up between acting jobs by working in a restaurant, where she met the confident and tattooed Fernando*.
‘Instantly there was this chemistry between us. I sensed that he could be a bit dangerous – he had a bad boy edge. It was fantastic at the beginning’ she remembers.
‘I’d never met somebody who’d really understood me so much. His calm and relaxed personality was really attractive to me, because I am quite scattered.’
The couple moved in together after three months of dating and, at first, Ambrosine was happy. Then the cracks started to show.
One day at work, Fernando, who had always been sweet and complimentary, called her a ‘f***ing bitch’over a tiny misdemeanour.
‘He suddenly turned and I saw a different person; he looked different,’ Ambrosine recalls. ‘I was so stunned by it. But then there were the apologies and the flowers and the excuses about being stressed.’
Hoping it was a one off, she forgave him.Then it happened again. And again. Fernando would criticise Ambrosine’s choice of clothes, her friends, and accuse her of having affairs, which would end in explosive rows.
‘It was exhausting. The arguments just increased and you could never win,’ she remembers. ‘They would go into the middle of the night, I couldn’t sleep and he’d never leave me alone to think. If I left the house, he’d call me 100 times. He’d follow me in the car; it was just awful.’
Fernando would sometimes physically block Ambrosine if she tried to leave the room, and often stick to her ‘like glue’, leaving her feeling intimated and frightened.
‘I didn’t realise at the time, but his behaviour is categorised as domestic abuse. If someone throws their dinner at the wall, it is shocking and aggressive, you have this fear of – if he can do that, what can he do to me? He would get angry, throwing stuff around and punching things and his temper could go from 0-100 in seconds. There were a lot of excuses and mind games.’
Fernando would blame his addictions for his behaviours, while Ambrosine felt that she was living a double life; too ashamed to tell her friends and family what was going on, too stuck to leave him.
It was only after two years – by which point they were no longer working together – that she chose a day when Fernando was hours from home, to pack up and leave the apartment with whatever she could fit in a few bags.
‘I didn’t actually have anywhere to go, and that was chaotic and terrifying. I was able to stay with a friend across town where I just went into survival mode,’ she explains.
However, Ambrosine had gone straight from the frying pan into the fire; she found a studio in a ‘very sketchy gangland area of Pasedena’, which was soon condemned due to a gas leak. There were three drive-by shootings within her first few weeks at her new home and then, amid the panic, Fernando had found out where she lived and moved nearby.
He called begging Ambrosine’s forgiveness and before long, she relented. Knowing what her friends would say about the relationship, she kept him a secret -stopping short of moving back in with him.
‘He was saying: “Look, I’ve changed. I’m doing AA. I want to fix things.” And I believed him. My confidence was very low by this point,’ she admits.
It was also a busy time for Ambrosine, who was juggling her studies at The Groundlings, with various acting and comedy gigs, while also working as a nanny for a family that required a lot of her time.
Despite giving the relationship another chance, she discovered that he hadn’t changed at all – she was still under his control. It took another explosive row in 2024, for Ambrosine to muster the courage to tell him she wanted him out of her life for good.
This time, he seemed to actually get the message and disappeared from her life.
‘I thought – “God, that was easy”. Then, a few days later I was at home chatting to family on a zoom call in my dressing gown, and my door flew open, he barged in, and he was raging,’ remembers Ambrosine.
To her horror, Fernando pulled her studio apart and chased her, before she managed to lock him out. Terrified for her life, Ambrosine called the police and filed for a restraining order.
Even so, he didn’t give up.
‘I was getting messages and hundreds of emails. I was at work with the kids and it was constant – all day. He was telling me he was going to get a gun, that his friends wanted to beat me up.’
Ambrosine took the messages to the local police station and the officer on the desk advised Ambrosine to protect herself.
‘I told him it was okay, that I had pepper spray and a Taser, and he said: “No. You need to get a gun”. It was insane – I couldn’t carry a gun, I didn’t want to live my life like that.’
But she also wanted to be safe, soAmbrosine headed to her nearest Target superstore to buy a gun.
‘The guy at the counter said, “We have a pink one. Do you like it?”’ she remembers. ‘I told him my story and he explained that they get a lot of female customers coming in with similar issues. It was really sad.’
The assistant advised Ambrosine to buy a weighty Glock 17 pistol that would reduce kickback impact and be easier to aim, adding that she would need to undertake firearms training and obtain a permit to carry before she could take the gun home.
Taking the first steps, she booked in some training and would put the paper targets peppered with gunshots in her car after.
A few days later Ambrosine picked up the children in her care from school and they found the targets. While they thought they were so fun and brilliant. I just thought: “This is so f***ed up. I can’t do this.”’
It got to the point where Ambrosine could barely sleep at night and even her friend was having nightmares about her imminent death, so when a year ago her mum begged her to come home, Ambrosina booked her ticket and flew back to Essex.
Although it meant she wouldn’t be able to testify against Fernando in court, he was convicted of two misdemeanours: vandalism and domestic battery.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, Ambrosine was dogged by hypervigilance and poor sleep. She was angry, exhausted and diagnosed with PTSD. Desperate to find a way to channel all her raw energy, she began writing about her experiences, and is about tell her story at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
‘I could never have stayed in LA. I didn’t want to be put in the position of having to actually kill somebody and have that on my conscience,’ Ambrosine explains. ‘If he’d barged into my home again, I would have shot my gun if I had it. If I’d killed him, I’d have to carry that for the rest of my life.’
After seeking therapy and with the help of medication, Ambrosine says that she is finally starting to feel like her old self again. ‘I’m very lucky, I have my mum, my animals, and some very good friends. And I carry a lot of hope. I’m still doing what I love and I’ve learned that I am very resilient,’ she explains.
‘I was very sad that I had to go. I’d loved California and my life there, despite all the craziness. But I’ve watched enough true crime documentary series to know exactly where it was heading – and I just wasn’t willing to become a statistic.’
Click here for more information about LA Baby by Ambrosine Davies at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
*Name has been changed
