Nicole can’t wait for her next play time
NiCOLe Kidman is keen to get back on stage as soon as possible to overcome a fear of debilitating stage-fright.
The Oscar- winning actress waited 17 years between doing The Blue Room at the Donmar Warehouse and on Broadway, and Photograph 51, the play she did with director Michael Grandage at the noel Coward in 2015.
‘i don’t want to get crippled by stage fright if i wait longer than another two years,’ Kidman told me when we met at the Toronto international Film Festival, where The Goldfinch, an epic film based on Donna Tartt’s bestselling novel, was having its premiere.
it tells the story of Theo Decker, a schoolboy whose mother is killed in a bomb blast at an art museum in new york.
Kidman plays the reserved, upper- class Mrs Barbour who takes in Theo, who happens to be her son’s school friend, after the tragedy.
Kidman said she would be pursuing some ideas about what might tempt her back to the stage over the next couple of years. she said she liked working with director John Crowley on The Goldfinch, and praised his ability to ‘dig deeply into the language’ of Tartt’s story. ‘He’s very rigorous in his character work,’ she added.
Kidman’s Mrs Barbour ‘is very still’, she noted. ‘she doesn’t want to reveal anything. she’s about keeping up appearances and stoicism.’
Mrs Barbour is my favourite character from both the book and the film. she’s the one, it always struck me, who, ultimately, cared the most about Theo. and i found her to be the emotional heart of the picture.
‘as soon as they get attached he’s taken away from her, but then he comes back ... she feels that he understands what she has been through,’ Kidman said. and as a result, ‘Theo takes on a value in her life’.
Oakes Fegley and ansel elgort play the young and the adult Theo. Kidman said she loved that The Goldfinch is an adult drama. ‘not too many of those get made,’ she added.
after Toronto, the actress was headed to new york for a couple of days. i suggested she go to see director Jamie Lloyd’s sublime production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. ‘The Hiddleston one?’ she said, eyes lighting up.
she said she’d try to catch the show (which also stars Zawe ashton and Charlie Cox) because she has just been working on a television drama series called The Undoing with susanne Bier — who directed Hiddleston in The night Manager.
and then she’s headed back home to nashville; to ‘children, homework, husband and real life’.