Kidman ignites creative fire
‘‘I’M not interested in being safe, and I’m willing to fail because of that,’’ Nicole Kidman declares, not a shred of doubt in her voice.
That may sound like the easy thing for an actor to say sitting in a quiet cabana at the luxurious Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc (in the south of France). But throughout her career, which includes three Oscar nominations and one victory, Kidman has always walked that particular walk as well as talked it, and never more so than this year.
Kidman had two films at the Cannes Film Festival (Philip Kaufman’s Hemingway & Gellhorn and Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy), and they showcase her in roles that couldn’t be more different. As far as Kidman is concerned, that is a good thing.
‘‘The diversity of characters is the thing I’m most interested in,’’ she says. ‘‘I don’t think I do well playing myself.’’
In Hemingway & Gellhorn, Kidman plays journalist Martha Gellhorn. Gellhorn was married to the novelist (played by Clive Owen) for five years but is best remembered today as one of the 20th century’s great war reporters.
‘‘I don’t get to read many scripts that are going to be made that are driven by a woman,’’ Kidman, 44, says of her interest in the project. If this HBO production and Kidman’s role share the pleasant feeling of classic film-making, The Paperboy, adapted from the Pete Dexter novel, is something else.
A lurid, wildly excessive melodrama that depicts rural Florida in the 1960s as a cesspool of feverish mendacity, The Paperboy features the actress as a character fellow residents of Moat County describe as ‘‘an oversexed Barbie doll’’. That would be Charlotte Bless, a woman of formidable, unapologetic sexuality whose main activity is starting (letter-writing) romances with death-row inmates.
She focuses on Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack), a sullen, white-trash alligator hunter behind bars for killing the local sheriff, and convinces Miami journalist Ward James (Matthew McConaughey) and his younger brother Jack (Zac Efron) that his claims of innocence are worth investigating.
A maelstrom of seething emotions, The Paperboy features scenes of extreme and graphic sexuality. In taking the part, Kidman was guided, as she often is, by her connection with the film-maker.
‘‘I believe in putting an enormous amount of trust in your director and I’m willing to take the knocks if it doesn’t work,’’ she says. ‘‘I’ve chosen that path, chosen to contribute, and I have to trust as an actor and try not to be a control freak.’’
With Kaufman, Kidman responded to a director she describes as ‘‘incredibly deep and a philosopher with a very wise outlook on life’’. A fan of Daniels’ best picture Oscar nominee Precious, Kidman describes the director as feeling ‘‘‘give me all of it, I want to devour the world’. Lee is raw and abandoned, he will do or say anything, he’s completely erratic and wild and will shock you with the things he says’’.
She is used hearing criticism. ‘‘There are so many different opinions out there, it is so extreme, diverse and loud, there is so much noise, that to get caught up in that seems like minutiae,’’ she says.
What she does feel is ‘‘protective of the director. I worry about how they’re going to fare’’.
The
to
thing that Kidman feels most protective about, however, is her marriage to Kiwi-born country star Keith Urban and her two youngest children, fouryear-old Sunday and 17-month-old Faith. (She has two other children from her previous marriage to Tom Cruise.)
‘‘That’s my priority in terms of my life,’’ she says, noting that she and Urban try not to be apart for more than three or four days and that he took a long plane ride to be with her for a day in Cannes.
Projects Kidman takes now must factor family in.
‘‘Six months in Africa, I can’t do that,’’ she says. ‘‘I cannot stand to be away from the girls. I’m not willing to leave them – it’s very painful.’’
The couple and their children live outside Nashville, Tennessee, an area Kidman enjoys, among other reasons, because it is ‘‘removed’’ from the limelight.
‘‘When you get to this age, I want to breathe, I can go with the flow of it,’’ she explains.
‘‘There’s still a fire that ignites in me creatively, but I know how to put it out for a while.’’