MAKING A ‘KILLING’
Kidman reveals challenges of playing endangered wife in ‘Sacred Deer’
NEW YORK — For anyone wondering whether Nicole Kidman can make time for family with her intense film and TV schedule, the answer is a big yes.
“I just flew in from Nashville. I had a gymnastics class with the kids,” Kidman, 50, said on Saturday as she arrived at a Manhattan screening to discuss Friday’s wonderfully weird “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.”
Her daughters Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret remained with husband Keith Urban back home. The girls, she added, “are doing a whole thing with gymnastics.”
Kidman, who won a special Cannes award in May for having four titles in the festival, just won a best actress Emmy as an abused housewife in HBO’s “Big Little Lies.”
She plays another endangered wife and mother in “Sacred Deer,” the latest drama from “The Lobster” writer and director Yorgos Lanthimos.
In “Sacred Deer,” Kidman’s Anna finds herself and her two children in life-threatening circumstances.
Equally strange are the bedroom sessions with her cardiac surgeon husband (Colin Farrell, her co-star in “The Beguiled”).
The two play-act with a nude Kidman prone on the bed, playing dead.
Are these the weirdest sex scenes she’s ever filmed?
“Oh no, I think I’ve done a few of those. But I thought it was pretty extraordinary, just the way it’s like I’ve had a general anesthetic and lying there,” she said, downing an espresso.
Her first run through the script shocked her. “I read it and I reread it and then I re-read it! But it’s really unusual and really interesting about what it says about the relationship.
“I don’t view them as ‘sex scenes’ because I view the interaction between people sexually. I don’t label them ‘sex scenes’ ’cause they’re still part of the narrative,” she said.
“If they are ‘sex scenes,’ then they’re exploitative and they’re not something that I’m interested in. If they’re telling the story like in ‘Big Little Lies,’ where they’re very much about what the characters are, who they are and the way they interact socially, then that’s important.”
Kidman and co-star Reese Witherspoon famously were turned down by every Hollywood studio when as producers they tried to get “Big Little Lies” made.
“That was like our baby. Reese and I,” she added, “are now working so hard to get season two made.”