Nicole Kidman's Balancing Act
Academy Award–winner Nicole Kidman discusses the upcoming Netflix whodunnit The Perfect Couple, her multifaceted filmography, philanthropic work, and obsession with horror.
Photography MATTHEW BROOKES
Styled by JASON BOLDEN
Nicole Kidman is the rare movie star who manages to move from big-budget popcorn flick [Aquaman] to arthouse cinema [The Killing of a Sacred Deer] with relative ease—no, make that proficiency. So is it any wonder she was chosen by AMC Theatres as the woman responsible for getting audiences excited about attending the movies again?
The We come to this place for magic promotion has already been memed to death, and Kidman has been questioned about it ad nauseam, meaning that is the last thing I intended to bring up when I met with Kidman; we focused on her illustrious career and her upcoming projects, including the soapy Netflix whodunnit The Perfect Couple, opposite Liev Schrieber, out September 5, and the erotic thriller Babygirl, co-starring Harris Dickinson and Antonio Banderas, in theaters December 20.
It’s Fourth of July weekend and on the day of our Zoom meeting, Kidman, 57, immediately presents herself as an observant, curious interviewee. She’s fascinated by the art in the background of my residence, a home I’ve rented for the weekend in Fire Island. Kidman is quick to inform me that she’s been on the gay mecca known as Fire Island twice herself. “Have you been to any wild parties?” I tell her I’ve been to several that weekend alone. “That's what happens there,” she says. The second time Kidman visited Fire Island, she drove up on the Fourth of July for a party. “I got a lot of love.” Could you imagine walking down the boulevard in Fire Island and running into Nicole Kidman? She laughs and says, “I wore a hat.” As if a hat could effectively disguise one of the most instantly recognizable movie stars.
Lately, Kidman has been enjoying her time on high-profile television series like Big Little Lies, Expats, The Undoing, and the upcoming The Perfect Couple. The latter is based on Elin Hilderbrand’s novel of the same name. Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, a famous novelist marrying off one of her three sons to Eve Hewson’s Amelia Sacks, who is very much not part of Greer’s high society social stature. When a body washes up on the beach the day of the wedding, everyone’s a suspect, including Greer. “I've fallen in love with the long format because I like the building of character and I like that they're limited,” Kidman says. “You're not committing a huge amount of time. It's still got a cinematic feel to it. It’s more like a slow burn than a film, where you only have two hours to tell your story and build a character.” The Perfect Couple reunites Kidman with director Susanne Bier, who directed Kidman in HBO’s The Undoing. In the latter series, Kidman was an unsuspecting murder suspect. In this one, Kidman gets to play a disapproving matriarch who very well may have committed murder. “[Greer] is surprising. Greer is the matriarch. She's tough, but she's a mother bear. She's very protective of her sons; she's very bright, and very complicated. I like how she's inscrutable, a survivor, and formidable.”
Kidman has done nearly everything at this point. She’s been nominated for five Academy Awards and won one (Best Actress in 2003 for The Hours), won six of 17 Golden Globe nominations, and won two Emmys for the popular HBO series Big Little Lies. Outside of acting, Kidman has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF since 1994, an ambassador for UNIFEM since 2006, and a brand ambassador for Balenciaga. She splits her time between homes with country singer husband Keith Urban and their two daughters Sunday and Faith in Sydney, Nashville, and New York—not that Kidman is at home often.
"Our duty and purpose in the world is to help others, not to get a pat on the back for it."
“I'm willing to travel, which a lot of people are not,” Kidman says of her work. “My kids are willing to travel… maybe less so now [that they’re older], but they're very interested in the world, too. They say they've got so many stamps on their passport, more than most people that are in their eighties. That's because when they were little, they lived in Morocco [where Kidman filmed Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert] and then we went to the Algerian Desert, where they were riding camels and in the souks for three and a half months. They've lived in France, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Asia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, all over.”
Kidman sees her work—whether it be her philanthropic work or traveling to various countries to film—as part of her global education. “It’s given me an empathetic heart and a way into people's lives that I never would have been exposed to [otherwise]. Documentaries do that; articles do that. I read a lot, too. I don't think existing only in your own territory is good. Always reaching out to understand, learn, and see different perspectives is how I was raised. That's probably why I travel. It gives me a greater understanding of how people view their country in relation to the world. I'm teaching my children that service work is something that is not about you,” she says. “I was reading this really interesting article where this woman gave a kidney, and then her friend didn't acknowledge it. It caused this whole rift [between them]. When you do things philanthropically, or for a good reason, you don't expect anything in return. Our duty and purpose in the world is to help others, not to get a pat on the back for it. I really feel strongly about that.” It’s why Kidman finds it difficult to accept awards for humanitarian work. “That feels deeply uncomfortable,” she says. “There are different times when you have to show up because it means more people will donate or there'll be more light put on that subject matter. It can't be self-serving.”
"Part of my path in life is learning not to be so overly empathetic with people that it destroys me or sabotages me."
Kidman also feels that films have the opportunity to make a positive change in the world. After playing the role of domestic abuse survivor Celeste Wright in Big Little Lies, she had “so much more understanding and connection with people that have been through that [domestic abuse].” Her role as Nancy Eamons, the wife of a Baptist preacher (Russell Crowe), whose son (Lucas Hedges) is put through conversion therapy in Boy Erased, was also enlightening. “A very small film, but for me, an important film,” she says. “Did it receive all the glory it needed? No, but it definitely shined a light [on the horrors of conversion therapy]. I get so many people coming up to me saying, ‘Thank you; you helped my family by making that film.’ There are roles where I go, It was so difficult, but the actual adventure of it was extraordinary,” she says. “It's imprinted on my psyche in a way that I can go back and dream about it and go, I was in that place and that was me. I was living in those mountains, or in that desert, or in a tent, or riding a camel, or hiking a mountain in Belfast that was reminiscent of where the Vikings were. I mean, these are things no one else gets to do. I've hiked through the forests of Sweden in the middle of the winter with Lars von Trier [for 2003’s Dogville] going, Where am I? What am I doing? I've been in Thailand in the depths of the forest where they had the prisoners of war during World War II [in 2013’s The Railway Man] and saw the railways that they made. When would I ever have been here?”
One of the highlights of Kidman’s AFI Lifetime Achievement speech in April was the moment she named (nearly) every director that she’s worked with in her career. Kidman tells me that she initially wanted to name every country she’d ever filmed in, but that might have been overdoing it. She is also quick to apologize for excluding some directors by accident. “There are a lot of directors on that list and I left a few off. I left James Wan off, which was devastating to me,” she says. She worked with Wan on both 2018’s Aquaman and the 2023 sequel Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, two superhero films more in line with Joel Schumacher’s campy Batman Forever (1995), Kidman’s first foray into the DC Comics Universe.
What intrigues Kidman about jumping into roles that some think an actress of her caliber should balk at? In regard to Batman Forever, Kidman recalls, “Everyone's like, ’Why are you doing that?’ I'm like, ‘Because I get to kiss Batman!’ For Kidman, it’s all about trying things she hasn’t done before. “The thing people don't understand is, it's not about the check. A lot of the mainstream big blockbusters that I do are hopefully different,” she says. In fact, when Wan first approached her about Aquaman, she thought it was for a horror project. “I’d really wanted to work with him in horror.”
Kidman has been in a few psychological horror thrillers, like The Others and Stoker. I mention Stoker is a fave, to which she responds, “That’s a deep cut; no one ever mentions Stoker. [Director] Park Chan-wook, I love him. That monologue; that was the reason I did it.” It’s no surprise that an intense monologue is a lure to any actor, although Kidman has a particular ability to emote intensely, like in Birth when the camera rests on only the grief on her face for two minutes in an opera scene. “[In] The Northman, well, it's not a monologue, but it's a scene that's shot in almost one shot by [director] Robert Eggers, where I seduce Alexander Skarsgård as his mother. I love that scene, too.” Her affinity for these emotionally taxing scenes has managed to get the better of her.
"I’ve not done classic horror yet. Hardcore horror. I’m putting it out there, because I watch hardcore horror."
“I obviously feel things really, really, really deeply,” Kidman says. “My mother would always say, raising me, it was raising a highly sensitive child. Part of my path in life is learning not to be so overly empathetic with people that it destroys me or sabotages me, because I can move into other people's skin and psyche in a very weird way. It's almost like a pull. I can physically manifest it and emotionally manifest it. It can be very, very frightening at times.” The upcoming Babygirl, in which Kidman plays a CEO who gets involved in a forbidden romance with a younger employee (Harris Dickinson), was “very tough” because emotionally it was “very deep.” She says doing something like The Perfect Couple is a good balance with that. “Otherwise I am too ragged,” she says. “I can't do that back-to-back.”
Kidman loves theater as well, despite the fact that she hasn’t been on stage since 2015’s Photograph 51 on the West End. “I want to do something on stage, but I have to choose carefully right now. I don't want to become sick or drained to the point where I can't function properly. That's deeply honest about just my own ability. What did Lawrence Olivier say? ‘Try acting?’ Yes, I do the acting, but at the same time, there's a part of me that, when it's connected to the right role, is all-encompassing and a bit frightening where I go. I have to tread carefully.”
You’d think horror would also be emotionally draining, but it’s surprisingly one of Kidman’s favorite genres. I ask her for a horror recommendation and she’s quick to respond, “the Aussie one, Talk to Me, did you see that?” I nod in the affirmative, telling her how terrifying I found it. “There you go,” Kidman says. “I’ve not done classic horror yet. Hardcore horror. I’m putting it out there, because I watch hardcore horror. I’m a fan of Ti West!” We come to this place for magic... for Kidman, her next magic trick should be frighteningly good.
HAIR: Adir Abergel A-FRAME AGENCY
MAKEUP: Kate Synnott THE WALL GROUP
DIGITAL TECH: Stowe Richards
PHOTO ASSISTANTS: Kurt Mangum, Kendall Pack,
Arden Core, and John Mumblo
PROPS: Jamie Dean
PRODUCED BY: Michael Power
PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS: David Ruiz
and Kiyana Tehrani
STYLING ASSISTANTS: Daniel Sepulveda
and John Mumblo
