Nicole: “Hugh’s deeply loveable!”
With those long winter evenings almost upon us as the clocks go back, we’ll need a fix of must-watch TV to keep us going. Top of the list of goodies this autumn is a critically-acclaimed thriller starring Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman. The A-list pair play husband and wife in whodunnit The Undoing – and as Aussie Nicole revealed, they’ve waited a long time to work together…
I WANTED JULIA ROBERTS’ ROLE IN NOTTING HILL BUT I WASN’T WELL KNOWN ENOUGH
She has an Academy Award, five Golden Globes, two Emmys and countless nominations to her name – and Hollywood star Nicole Kidman’s latest project, psychological thriller The Undoing, looks set to earn her more plaudits. Not only did she co-produce and star in the six-part series, she also sang the theme tune!
Nicole, 53, admitted, “I finished the thing shattered, actually. I did find it really long and taxing emotionally. It took five months to shoot this thing, and [due to the pandemic] we shot the whole thing out of sequence. I found that really hard.”
In the gripping series, based on the novel You Should Have Known, Nicole plays Grace Fraser, a successful New York therapist who has a seemingly perfect life with husband and oncologist Jonathan (Hugh Grant) and their young son. But when a new mum at his school is murdered, Jonathan disappears, and questions are raised about his true identity.
RETIREMENT
Australian actress Nicole said she loved working with Hugh, 60, after managing to lure him out of “retirement” for the role as they were both desperate to work together. The pair first met at a dinner over 20 years ago in London at The Ivy, when Nicole was still married to Tom Cruise and Hugh was dating model Elizabeth Hurley. Nicole had been considered for a role in Love Actually and revealed she craved a role in another of Hugh’s hit movies. She said, “I really wanted the role that Julia Roberts played in Notting Hill, but I wasn’t well known enough – and I wasn’t talented enough! So, finally our paths [have] aligned.”
Nicole is keen to work with Hugh again, describing him as “deeply loveable” and said that as they have both played the villain in the Paddington movies, they want to do a third.
Nicole laughed, “We’re gonna have our own film as the two villains. That would be kind of entertaining. We’d get the bear. The bear wouldn’t survive!” Laughing, she added, “That would not do well... the film would flop!”
DIFFERENT LIFE
While making The Undoing on location in New York, Nicole’s musician husband Keith Urban, 52, and their daughters, 12-year-old Sunday and nine-year-old Faith, came along. But being used to being together a lot didn’t mean that the restrictions of lockdown, during which they holed up in their Nashville family home, were easy to adjust to.
“We travel together, so we’re always together, but never where you’re in a house and you can’t go to the store, to a restaurant or the movies,” she said. “Staying home, doing school from home and all of those things that everyone has been doing is a completely different life for us.”
But there were plenty of positives too, with Nicole teaching herself Italian as well as enjoying games in the garden with her girls and
making music with Keith. She said, “I’ve been doing a lot of mothering, which is a great thing. I learn so much from it. You get to give a lot but I learn so much from them. And I broke my ankle; I was confined to bed, but it healed beautifully because I couldn’t do anything – which is great when you need it to heal, right?”
Workaholic Nicole also admitted that it’s Keith who tells her to slow down when she takes on too much. She said, “Keith is very chilled... He can tell me, ‘Listen, baby, why not pull back on that?’ And I’ll kind of nod and listen and then I won’t necessarily do what he says! Probably a lot of men have this; they’re far better at just going, ‘Mmm, that’s enough now.’ Being able to compartmentalise and sleep. [It’s a] fantastic attribute – wish I had it!”
● The Undoing, Mon 26 Oct, 2am/ 9pm, Sky Atlantic/NOW TV