Nicole Kidman makes a ‘Killing’
Dark comedy ‘Sacred Deer’ is her weirdest yet
Nothing could have prepared Nicole Kidman for The Killing of a Sacred
Deer.
The actress, who won an Emmy Award in September for HBO’s Big Little Lies, blindly signed on to work with Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos after watching his peculiar dystopian romance The Lobster. When she read the script, she discovered an even stranger story than that black comedy, in which people are turned into animals if they can’t find soulmates.
In Sacred Deer (now showing in 34 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and Dallas; additional cities Friday; nationwide Nov. 10), Kidman plays Anna, the austere wife of a brilliant surgeon, Steven (Colin Farrell), who is accused of killing a menacing teen’s father on his operating table. Struck by a curse, Steven and Anna must choose which of their family to sacrifice to right that wrong.
Lanthimos finds unexpected, unsettling humor in the clan’s stilted interactions, as the couple’s children become paralyzed and beg to be spared.
“I was like, ‘Yorgos, I have no idea how to play this as a comedy,’ ” says Kidman, laughing. She turned to Farrell, who worked with Lanthimos on The
Lobster and continually assured her, “This will be like nothing you’ve ever experienced.”
The film — a riff on the Greek myth of Iphigenia, who is threatened with sacrifice after her father kills a sacred deer — is meant to make audiences “uncomfortable, but also kind of entertained,” Lanthimos says. The former certainly applies to Steven and Anna’s “general anesthetic” sex, a position in which she goes limp like a medicated patient.
Sacred Deer is one of four wildly different projects Kidman, 50, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, along with this summer’s The Beguiled, fall miniseries Top of the Lake: China Girl and upcoming sci-fi romance How to
Talk to Girls at Parties. Beginning with her Oscar nomination for last year’s
Lion, the actress is in the midst of an Internet-bestowed “Kidmanaissance,” which she chalks up to coincidence.
Work “ebbs and flows,” Kidman says. “Is it lovely for it to collide with turning 50? Yes, and to be able to have Big Little
Lies embraced like it was — particularly at this time for women — speaks loudly to the community.”
In the miniseries, Kidman played a well-to-do housewife and victim of domestic abuse, which she called a “complicated, insidious disease” in her Emmys acceptance speech. But she’s wary of discussing the flood of sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, who produced Kidman films such as Lion, The Others and Cold Mountain. “I’ve made my statement, and I’m reluctant to get into this now because that would be a whole other (topic),” she says.
Next up, Kidman will appear in superhero movie Aquaman and gayconversion drama Boy Erased. Although it hasn’t been officially announced, she teases that a second season of Big Little
Lies is “moving forward at a rapid rate,” and hopes it will start production early next year.
“Because of the responses of audiences and critics, it was like, ‘Gosh, we really should explore these women further,’ ” Kidman says. “It seemed sad to abandon them when they’ve only just gotten started.”