EXTREME MAKEUNDER: NICOLE KIDMAN LOSES HERSELF IN GRITTY NEW ROLE
▶ Oscar winner is unrecognisable in her latest role. James Mottram talks to the film’s director about the transformation
Hollywood loves a good transformation. Actors who physically go to extremes to change their looks and shape automatically capture the imagination, whether it’s Robert De Niro’s weight gain for Raging Bull or Christian Bale’s skeletal physique for The Machinist.
Yet there probably isn’t a more startling turn in recent times than Nicole Kidman in Karyn Kusama’s new LA cop drama Destroyer.
Cast as Erin Bell, an LAPD detective to whom the years have not been kind, the Australian star utterly disappears into the character. Mottled skin, dark circles under the eyes and a shaggy dishwater-brown wig, it pushed the 51-year-old star far from her comfort zone. Kidman told her director, “I don’t want to look like Nicole Kidman. I don’t even want people to see me. I need people to only see Erin Bell’.”
In an interview with The
National, Kusama said her star didn’t need to spend hours in the make-up chair every day before filming. Kidman, who won a Golden Globe nod for her role, began with make-up tests at home.
“The make-up part wasn’t actually very long. It was probably shorter than a glamour make-up approach. So it was maybe forty minutes or something. We found a way towards something very streamlined with her,” Kusama says.
Still, there is more to disappearing into a character than simply working with a good make-up artist. Here, Kidman goes through a dramatic physical transformation.
“I kept talking to her about collapsing around your heart and almost looking like you’re hurt all the time,” says Kusama, who watched Kidman change her graceful posture into a bow-legged “limping, loping walk”.
Then there’s Bell’s raspy voice. “She did a lot of voice work to drop her voice down for the present-day scenes. I think that was what required a little more concentration for her.” Factor in her clothes – boots, jeans and a masculine leather jacket – and the Kidman that you’ve seen grace dozens of red carpets is nowhere to be seen.
Kusama was left spellbound. “She’s always been so adventurous,” she says. “But what is really remarkable about her is she now embraces her age and embraces the power that comes with it, the wisdom, and she can say ‘I’m 51 and I do what I want to do now. I’m at a moment where I have more choices in front of me.’ She’s sort of in the best creative zone as an artist that I think she’s ever [been in].”
Scripted by Kusama’s husband Phil Hay and his writing partner Matt Manfredi, Destroyer sees Kidman’s character on the hunt for a charismatic, volatile gang leader (Toby Kebbell) who re-surfaces some seventeen years after a more fresh-faced Bell went undercover to infiltrate his criminal outfit. While that ended in tragedy, his reappearance gives Bell a shot at putting her demons to bed.
Flashing back and forth, what really shocks is the way time withered Bell. “If you really think about it, time isn’t kind to all of us,” says Kusama. “There’s often reasons for it, but it’s not typical that we ask, ‘How did you get here?’ Lots of people tell her she looks terrible but no one asks why. That’s the world we live in: happy to comment on what you look like but not really delve into how you got there.”
Another aspect that Destroyer challenges is the crime movie itself. Kusama’s cinematographer and editor are women in a genre so often dominated by men. Julie Kirkwood is her cinematographer and editing is by Plummy Tucker. Then there is Kidman’s tough-as-nails central character; normally it’s the men who get to play the anti-authoritarian gun-toting cop. “A lot of the rogue cop movies that have men at the centre seem to be more focused on the idea of appetites and the idea of excess,” says Kusama.
“I think this story is more internal and more demanding because of it but I hope it brings with it a different kind of satisfaction to see someone really fight against themselves, and then come to some small – but very significant – sense of self-awareness.” Part of what makes Bell’s journey different is that she’s also a mother struggling with her teenage daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn).
“I think to us the heart of the story is her relationship with her daughter,” says screenwriter Hay.
“Nicole spoke about this a lot – she has love inside her, she is caring, she has those human things, but she’s really marginalised them and not imagined that she deserves any of those things.”
The result is a film that takes on far more profound themes than your usual copsand-crooks thriller. As the enigmatic title hints, here is a world where so many elements – “ambition, money, greed”, notes Hay – are all destroyers. But there’s one thing above all else.
“Time is the ultimate destroyer,” says Kusama. “In the end, time wins. It keeps going. We don’t.”
There is more to disappearing into a character than simply working with a good make-up artist
Destroyer opens in the UAE on January 17