Kidman, Grant on their twisty HBO thriller ‘The Undoing’
HBO’S “The Undoing” is another dark, binge-worthy thriller from David E. Kelley, the creator of “Big Little Lies.” But for a sector of the internet that loves marmalade-eating bears, it’s also a link to the “Paddington” universe.
The show’s stars, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, played Paddington’s fiendishly funny foes in the 2015 film and its 2018 sequel, respectively, making “Undoing” a quasi-villain team-up.
“In some ways, ‘The Undoing’ is really the ‘Paddington’ origin story: how those two people became who they were,” Grant jokes.
“God! Don’t write that!” Kidman says with a laugh. Her daughters Sunday Rose, 12, and Faith Margaret, 9, “were absolutely mortified that I was playing the person that wanted to hurt the bear. I remember they didn’t want to show their friends because they were embarrassed that I was the villain.”
The villains are much harder to spot in “Undoing” (premiering Sunday, 9 EDT/ PDT), a six-episode limited series based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2014 novel “You Should Have Known.”
The series follows Grace Fraser (Kidman), a successful therapist and wife to Jonathan (Grant), a pediatric oncologist, living in New York’s Upper East Side. Their teenage son Henry (Noah Jupe) attends a prestigious prep school, which suddenly becomes the eye of a media hurricane when a young mother (Matilda De Angelis) is brutally murdered the night after a glamorous school fundraiser. Jonathan vanishes the same day, making him a leading suspect in the case.
To say much more would spoil the drama’s relentless, nail-biting twists.
“It was interesting to play somebody who cannot decipher her own life properly,” Kidman says. “So many people say, ‘I’m fantastic at reading everything, but when it comes to my own life, forget it.’”
With its rich housewives, intense therapy scenes and central murder mystery, “Undoing” has parallels to “Big Little Lies,” for which Kidman won a best actress Emmy. She acknowledges “some similarities” between the soapy HBO dramas, but says the new show is more of a psychological thriller.
“It is meant to be a ride, and it’s been particularly constructed so that each episode ends in a (cliffhanger),” says Kidman, 53, who also executive produces and sings the series’ title theme. Her advice for watching: “Don’t believe anything you get told. Nothing is what it seems.”
The Oscar winner has been good friends with Grant since the early ’90s, and even came close to a small role in his 2003 rom-com “Love Actually.”
“They’re both very compelling and very sexy together,” adds director Susanne Bier (Netflix’s “Bird Box”). “There was a fun, flirtatious (dynamic), and yet in these scenes, there are huge tensions between them.”