NICOLE’S BOLD CHOICES
Daring actress stays busy (and relevant) by taking risks
I’m at that place in my life where I still try to act as though I’m 21 and starting my career. I still have a passion for acting.
Call it the Kidmanaissance. The Australian actress, who turns 50 this summer, is appearing in four separate projects at the Cannes Film Festival. Two are in competition for the Palme d’Or: in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer she co-stars with Colin Farrell as parents beset by a mysterious evil force; and in The Beguiled, from Sofia Coppola, she plays a teacher at an all-girls school in the Civil War South who must decide what to do when an injured Yankee soldier (Farrell again) shows up on the doorstep.
Kidman can also be seen in the out-of-competition How to Talk to Girls at Parties, directed by John Cameron Mitchell, in which she plays a kind of punk den mother in 1977 South London. Finally, critics can catch her in episodes of China Girl, the second season of Top of the Lake, from director Jane Campion.
It’s part of a series of 70th-anniversary events at the festival, alongside the new season of Twin Peaks, and a virtual reality exhibit from Alejandro Iñárritu.
“To have four projects here, I mean that’s sort of a confluence of events,” she says, sounded a bit embarrassed by how everywhere she is. “It’s not something I was aware would happen. But at this stage in my life I’m just trying to stay very bold and open and try things for filmmakers that I believe in.”
That stage has been ongoing for some time now. Since 2014, in addition to her TV and film projects at Cannes, she’s had 14 additional acting credits, from the lauded — a role in the recent film Lion that earned her a best supporting actress Oscar nomination — to the best forgotten.
(Kidman starred in Cannes’ opening-night film Grace of Monaco in 2014, a biopic the Guardian likened to a 104-minute Chanel ad, “only without the subtlety and depth.”)
She seems accepting of the notion that not everything she touches will turn to gold.
“Sometimes you fail, sometimes you succeed; that’s just the journey. You get back up. That’s something as a mother I try to teach my children. I’ll learn from everything.” Mistakes? “Make many of them, but try to get back up and keep going.”
Kidman found fame early — she was in her early 20s and already a seasoned Australian actress when North Americans took note of her in films like Dead Calm (1989) and Days of Thunder (1990), opposite future husband Tom Cruise. (She’s been married to country singer Keith Urban since 2006.)
But her choice of roles has never been straightforward; in 1995 and ’96, for instance, she appeared in Gus Van Sant’s thriller To Die For, Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, based on the Henry James novel.
In 1998, she took to the stage in London and New York in The Blue Room.
In some ways, little has changed. She’s still working with Campion, whom she considers a close friend. She’s playing Queen Atlanna in the 2018 superhero movie Aquaman. She recently appeared in Genius, a period piece about Max Perkins’ time as an editor at Scribner’s in the early 20th century. And in 2015, she returned to the London stage in the play Photograph 51.
“I’m at that place in my life where I still try to act as though I’m 21 and starting my career,” she says.
“At this age, I still have a passion for acting and for cinema and for storytelling and for pushing boundaries and for moving out of my comfort zone ... to try things with an abandonment. I’m totally up for taking risks.”
And that, too, is nothing new. Kidman says she was taken to the theatre as a child. “I was actually not raised on cinema.”
But when she was about 13, in Sydney, she decided to “wag school” and go to the movies. “And I went and saw A Clockwork Orange.”
She was equal parts disturbed and amazed by Stanley Kubrick, whom she would later work with in what would be the director’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). But a love had been born.
“I’m a huge fan of cinema, and of being in a dark room watching a film,” she says, partly in reaction to the Netflix discussion that has captivated Cannes this year. “And being transported. I love that and I will always love that and I’m committed to it.”
Kidman has used her influence in her work, with a producing credit on the HBO series Big Little Lies, in which she stars with Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley.
And she’s well aware of the underrepresentation of female directors, listing figures from the L.A.-based Woman in Film organization, which reveal that only 4.2 per cent of major film releases in 2016 were directed by women, and about the same amount of episodic television.
“Hopefully it will change over time, but everyone keeps saying it’s so different now. It isn’t.”
But for all her advocacy and producing credits, Kidman remains very much a performer first.
“I don’t have to work,” she says.
“I work because it’s still my passion. It’s how I express myself. And as an actor you’re only as good as the opportunities you’re given.”
She’s determined to make sure those opportunities keep coming, and she’s eager to keep saying yes to them. “I’ve always had that slightly rebel spirit. I don’t want to conform; I want to find a way not to.”