USA TODAY International Edition
Nicole Kidman is a double threat at this year’s Oscars
The Oscar winner could take home gold for playing very different mothers in “Boy Erased” and “Destroyer.”
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – For Nicole Kidman, this holiday season brings a tale of two drastically different mothers. On Friday, “Boy Erased” begins expanding into theaters across the country, based on the true story of a Baptist family grappling with their son (played by Lucas Hedges) coming out. His preacher father Marshall (Russell Crowe) is ashamed and decides to send Jared off to Christian-based gay-conversion therapy. His mother, Nancy (Kidman), silently acquiesces.
Then this Christmas, Kidman takes the lead in “Destroyer” (out Dec. 25), a crime noir in which she plays Erin Bell, an alcoholic LAPD detective who has largely abdicated parenting duties to her teenage daughter as she throws herself into a decades-long quest to bring down a gang leader she failed to nab years before.
The pair of tour de force performances are earning Kidman raves and Oscar predictions.
“I’m playing mothers who are on different ends of the spectrum,” says Kidman, 51, a frothy cappuccino losing heat by her side. In “Destroyer,” Erin “is working through enormous pain and shame and wreckage,” she says, while Arkansas mom Nancy “is all love-based, is all about her child and still had to navigate through something that she did to him that she now feels incredibly ashamed about.”
Kidman, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, gently steers away from the film’s association with real-life politics. She says she hopes the film drives home the message that “you can navigate as a family through anything if you stay with the love.”
She wants gay children to watch “Boy Erased” and “feel safe. We all want to make the world feel safe. That there’s somewhere you can go where you’ll be understood.”
Old wounds drive “Destroyer,” in which Kidman plays an undercover cop who must live with a mission gone wrong, 17 years later. “Destroyer” depicts an almost unrecognizable Kidman, gravelly and gaunt, covered with liver spots, her hair shorn into a ragged crop.
“What she responded to was this idea of a spectrum of masculinity and femininity in all of us,” says director Karyn Kusama (“Girlfight,” “Jennifer’s Body”). “I think she was really drawn to the parts of this woman that were so unlike her, that were so emotionally shut down and so defensive.”
Kidman has been fascinating to watch of late, from her awardsweeping turn as a domestic abuse survivor in HBO’s “Big Little Lies” to eccentric independent releases such as “The Killing of the Sacred Deer” and her upcoming comicbook turn as Jason Momoa’s mom in “Aquaman.”
To Kidman, her career is “so random and weird” right now, she says with a laugh. She is equally open about what power means in Hollywood.
“I can get a certain (film made) sometimes. And sometimes not,” she says, describing an “out there” passion project she can’t get made. “That’s the reality. We cannot get funding for it . ... I would love to say, ‘Yeah, I can just get anything made.’ I mean, maybe Bradley Cooper can ... but I can’t.”