Top of her game
The TV series Vietnam launched Nicole Kidman’s career. Now, 30 years later, she’s back on the small screen. Steve Dow reports from the set of Top Of The Lake.
On a slightly overcast 17-degree winter’s morning on Bondi Beach, costumed bathers and surfboard riders gather around a taped-off crime scene. A key moment is being filmed in Jane Campion’s new season of her Top Of The Lake series, as detectives examine the body of a young woman which has washed ashore in a suitcase.
Nicole Kidman, too, is back on Sydney’s shores, playing an Australian teacher and dysfunctional mum called Julia who becomes locked in a battle of the mothers. Jane Campion’s own daughter, Alice Englert, 23, plays Nicole’s adopted 17-year-old daughter, Mary. Despite Hollywood success,
Top Of The Lake is important for
Jane – it’s her first TV work since An Angel at My Table in 1990, and the first TV series ever to be screened in its entirety at the respected Sundance Film Festival.
It also sees Nicole return to her roots, exactly three decades after playing a protester in the TV series Vietnam, a role she credits as her “breakout”. On camera, Nicole looks like the great director herself, having approached Jane for this role in Top Of The Lake: China Girl. Most recently seen as a well-coiffed woman brutally
abused in the US series Big Little Lies and as a southern belle in the Sofia Coppoladirected The Beguiled, Nicole looks looser and natural, showing off her freckles and unruly hair coloured grey. She credits Jane with discovering her as a 14-year-old.
“She encountered me with all of my insecurities and my hopes and my desires,” Nicole said later. “So she really knows me, and I feel unbelievably safe. I’ve shared probably the deepest, most intimate secrets I have with her as a friend.”
Why the steely hair for Nicole, I ask. “I think it looks great,” says Jane as we tour the set. “People won’t be able to recognise Nicole straight away. When you’re beautiful, tall and good-looking like she is, you sort of get trapped in that beauty thing. This is an opportunity to play and be funny; she’s a very funny person.”
At 50, Nicole confirms she still aches to play funny ladies. “They always say I’m not funny,” she admitted earlier this year. “So I’d love to do a comedy. I never get offered them.”
Nicole’s daughter, Sunday, to country music star Keith Urban, has “Lucille Ball in her”, she says. “So, I’m learning a lot of physical comedy from my nine-year-old daughter right now.”
Nicole gets her wish under Jane’s wing to be amusing. Her character, Julia, pretentiously claims to have travelled to London to study under Germaine Greer – except, when Julia arrived at the university, Germaine wasn’t there. Nicole calls herself a “Campion woman” when trying to describe how Jane works on set.
“There’s an honesty,” she says. “It’s not a presentation of a female. It’s just the female and there’s all the different aspects to it.”
Nicole’s nemesis here is feminist crime fighter Detective Robin Griffin, rivetingly played by Elisabeth Moss with a near-perfect Aussie accent, except the occasional North American pronunciation of “o”. Elisabeth also starred in the original series, set in New Zealand, four years ago. Her character, Robin, is teenager Mary’s real mother, who was conceived when Robin was raped as a teenager.
Elisabeth, 35, recently seen in The Handmaid’s Tale, asked for Robin to be “deeper and darker” in this second season, which also deals with Asian sex slavery and commercial surrogacy. “Jane’s very in tune to people’s emotions and feelings, and to what’s going on with you as an actor,” she says about the director. “But is that because she’s a woman? I don’t know. It’s because she’s a great director. I think she would say that it does have to do with her being a woman.”
Joining the cast is Game Of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie, 38, as Constable Miranda Hilmarson, who idolises Elisabeth’s detective character. Gwendoline was “transfixed” by the first Lake season, having watched it four times. “I’ve been a fan of Jane’s since I was 12 years old,” she says. “I was quite in love with the idea of being in that world.” Do Nicole’s daughters have any interest in acting?
“They do, actually,” Nicole says. “They have an interest in a lot of things, though.
They have an enormous interest in cats right now and dogs, way more than acting.”
For her part, Nicole is enjoying filming in Sydney, even if there are craggy cliffs and brothels in the mix. “I think the landscapes and the way they are depicted are different a lot of times when you see films from Australia,” she says. “You see a culture that’s an underground culture of Sydney, too.”