Why Nicole almost gave up on movies
Following a dry spell, Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman is back with a spate of acclaimed releases, and a superhero film
This time last year, Nicole Kidman was working with Oscarwinning make-up artist Bill Corso, perfecting the sun-damaged, sleep-deprived complexion of the LAPD detective she’d play in Destroyer, developing a leathery look far and away removed from the 51-year-old actress’ own fair skin.
Seeing their mom in full make-up for the first time, Kidman’s daughters — Sunday, 10, and Fifi, 7 — reacted in the blunt, truth-telling way that kids that age do.
“They called me ‘granny,’” Kidman remembers, laughing. “They’re like, ‘You’re our granny now.’”
Which got Kidman thinking. The girls’ school in Nashville — where Kidman, musician husband Keith Urban and their daughters live — was putting on a grandparents’ chocolate day. Both Kidman’s and Urban’s mothers live in Australia. So Kidman told her girls that’d she gladly don a wig and dress up and play their grandmother for the day.
Her idea was met with mortification. “I thought it’d be kind of quirky and funny and make for a good story for when they were older,” Kidman says, curled up cross-legged on a couch on a recent weekend in Los Angeles. And here she adopts a shaky, old person’s voice. “‘Oh ... hello Sunday! I’m here!’ And she’s just like, ‘Whatever you do, never, ever do that.’ So I won’t be dressing up as their granny — even though that’s what they called me!”
Kidman doesn’t exactly need to take on another part right now. She has two movies arriving in theatres: Destroyer, for which she just earned her 13th Golden Globe nomination, opens in limited release on Christmas Day, and Aquaman, in which she plays the title hero’s mother, aka The Queen of Atlantis, is out now in the UAE. Kidman can also currently be seen in the drama
Boy Erased, winning strong reviews for portraying the supportive mother of a young man struggling to reconcile his sexuality with his evangelical upbringing.
It’s the extension of a remarkable run of roles that began with Kidman’s Oscar-nominated performance in the 2016 film Lion and continued last year with starring turns in Sofia Coppola’s remake of The Beguiled and Yorgos Lanthimos’ unsettling The Killing of the
Sacred Deer and, of course, her work on the HBO series Big Little Lies, for which she won the Emmy, the SAG Award and the Golden Globe playing Celeste, a
woman hiding the dark secret of domestic violence behind a flawless facade.
Kidman, however, isn’t one to shape illusions about her life or her career. She says she almost gave up acting a few years ago, following a disappointing time of making films such as The Railway Man, Trespass and Before I Go to Sleep, movies that were barely seen and, aside from Kidman’s acting, harshly reviewed. The low point came at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival when the audience greeted her Grace Kelly homage Grace of Monaco with boos. Kidman sobbed in her hotel room.
“It’s probably not great to talk about when you’re old, but you start out as flavour of the month and then you’re not; you have some things that work and some that don’t, and suddenly no one’s interested,” Kidman says. “Then it’s, ‘You’ve squandered or lost your talent.’ And that’s not true. It’s always there if you’re nourishing it. And that’s what I was doing. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating.”
Unlike Matthew McConaughey and his celebrated, self-labelled McConaissance of a few years ago, Kidman didn’t have the luxury of choice. Women in Hollywood don’t. She tried to find funding for projects she wanted to produce. She starred in a celebrated production of Photograph 51 on the London stage. (“I was terrified no one was going to come,” she says. The entire 11-week run sold out.) And she tried to jump-start her film career.
“I wasn’t the first, second or third choice for Lion,” Kidman says. “[Director] Garth Davis was told not to cast me. That hurt. And Garth said, ‘No. That’s what I’m doing. I want to cast her.’ And he fought hard for me. So you know as an actor, they’re saying ‘No. I don’t want her. She’s not very good.’ And you just ...” Kidman pauses, remembering the wound. “‘Oooooh. OK.’ But that’s where I was with things not working and people go, ‘Eh. Not her.’”
With age, Kidman says she’s more comfortable in her skin, allowing herself to be more outgoing. Take the time earlier this year, when she was heckling Urban from the side of the stage during a listening party for his new album, calling on him to play the song Parallel Line. Urban’s reply: “Only if you come up here and sing with me.” With much trepidation, she did.
“I would never have normally got up there on the stage,” Kidman says. “Never. That’s a step.”
Though she prefers to put herself in a place of discomfort in her roles, Kidman loves to laugh and possesses a kooky sense of humour that’s rarely seen in her work. Those hankering for a look at Kidman’s lighter side would do well to see Aquaman, a movie she made partly because she and director James Wan, a fellow Australian, have long wanted to work together and mostly because her daughters can actually see a movie that their mom made.
“She actually said that her getting to play in this movie gave her kids a lot of street cred at their school,” Wan says, laughing. “I think that’s really adorable given how beloved she is in the filmmaking community and the world.”
It’s probably not great to talk about when you’re old, but you start out as flavour of the month and then you’re not; you have some things that work and some that don’t, and suddenly no one’s interested.”