Real women - bruises, lies and all
Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman tell Julie Eley about their starring roles in the new SoHo series Big Little Lies.
'We need to see real women's experiences, whether it involves domestic violence, whether it involves sexual assault, whether it involves romance or infidelity or divorce.' Reese Witherspoon
Nicole Kidman played it for real in her role as a woman in an abusive relationship in the new SoHo drama Big Little Lies.
The seven-part series, in which she plays Celeste Wright, the mother of twins, sees her in a series of physical altercations with her on-screen husband Perry (played by True Blood star Alexander Skarsgard). And the results were plain to see. ‘‘I was bruised. Those bruises were real,’’ says the Australian actress who told her Swedish co-star she wanted their scenes to be ‘authentic and real’.
‘‘Keith [husband Keith Urban] would ask me, ‘What the hell is going on on that set?’ Because I would come home, have a shower, and he would see me covered in bruises. But that’s how I work, I feel through things. As I get older I get more emotional and more sensitive.’’
Kidman is one of five female leads in the series, which is based on Australian author Liane Moriarty’s best-selling book of the same name. Also starring Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley and Zoe Kravitz, it centres on a group of mothers whose lives begin to unravel following a schoolroom incident, culminating in a possible murder.
The series moves Moriarty’s book from its Australian setting to Monterey, California, with Kidman and Witherspoon serving as executive producers.
While Moriarty was happy shifting the story Stateside, she had just one stipulation about the casting – Kidman had to take on the role of Celeste.
It was a request the 49-year-old mother-of-four was more than happy to agree to, especially as it meant starring alongside Witherspoon.
‘‘We have fun,’’ she says. ‘‘I don’t want to be working on things with people who I’m not happy to be [with]. I want to be contributing and working with people who I like and love, and this, this was the perfect combination.’’
Kidman says serving as executive producer on the project let her indulge her love of storytelling.
‘‘For me, as a child, my whole life was books and I would get lost in books. They were my fantasy and that’s where I could go and that was a lot of times the thing that saved me.
‘‘So I’m interested in storytelling. I love being an artist in this world now and connecting through art.’’
For Witherspoon, who plays the twice-married Madeleine Martha Mackenzie in the series, Big Little Lies was a way of presenting women in a realistic light instead of ‘‘women of incredible talent playing wives and girlfriends with thankless parts’’.
‘‘We need to see real women’s experiences, whether it involves domestic violence, whether it involves sexual assault, whether it involves romance or infidelity or divorce,’’ she says.
‘‘We need to see these things because we as human beings need to – we learn from art. And what can you do if you never see it reflected?’’
Big Little Lies, SoHo, tonight, and streaming on Neon.