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Brave. It’s different from being fearless. Kidman experiences fear. “Crippling fear at times,” she says. “But at the same time, I was raised by stoics.” The actress, who was born in Hawaii, grew up in Sydney, the eldest daughter of a biochemist father and a nurse-educator mother. In particular, she credits her late father, who later became a psychologist, with teaching her about stoicism at an early age. “It’s a philosophy, a way of behaving and being in the world, which I kind of don’t have,” she says wryly. “I have a little bit of it, but I have far more of, like, ‘Oh, my God, how am I going to get through this? I can’t get through this! I can’t get up!’ And then I think, ‘Get up!’” She shakes her head. “I think once you have children, your resilience is built, and your ability to go, ‘OK, I can’t wallow...and I certainly can’t get into bed for a week and never get out.’”
Still, resilience is a quality she has been building in herself for along time. “I’ve had artistic failures,” Kidman says. She has endured painful trials in her personal life as well, some of which she has spoken about openly, such as her fertility struggles and miscarriages during her marriage to Tom Cruise. After marrying in 1990, they divorced in 2001, and their adopted children, Isabella, now 25, and Connor, 23, opted to live with Cruise. Even today, Kidman is the subject of intense scrutiny when it comes to her relationship with her older children. “They’re adults now, married and off in their own lives,” she says. “They’re totally grown-up people.”
After brunch, she’s heading to New York City to see her “Mumma,” whom she has flown in, along with some friends, from Australia. “I’m on daughter duty for the next two days,” Kidman says. “I’m going to take her to the theater to see Carey Mulligan in
Girls & Boys. I’ll take her shopping—you know, things that you do.” While in the city, she also plans to visit with Naomi Watts, one of several Australians Kidman counts among her closest friends and collaborators. (Friends call them“Nic” and “Nai.”) “This concept in Australia that goes back a long way is mateship,” says Bruna Papandrea, an executive producer on
Big Little Lies (along with Kidman and Reese Witherspoon) who’s also part of that group. “Friendships are like family.” And Kidman is a crucial part of that family, in both Australia, where she and Urban own an operating farm in New South Wales, and the U.S.
Papandrea recalls one time in particular when Kidman was there for her. “When I really struggled to get pregnant, and I had multiple miscarriages, I remember at one of our other friends’ weddings being completely bereft and having that moment where you think it’s not going to happen,” she says. “And I remember [Nicole] taking me in her arms and just saying, ‘It’s going to be OK; you’ll make a family in the way you can,’ and how significant that was in that moment.
“You have to have empathy as a human to show empathy as an actor,” Papandrea adds.
On-screen, Kidman’s empathy seems to border on telepathy. There’s something almost supernatural about how she embodies her characters. As she puts it, “I get to live my life, but I get to go into other people’s lives too. They’re transient, but I absolutely live those lives.” Once in a while, she steps into a mythical being, like the queen of Atlantis, which she plays in the sci-fi fantasy
Aquaman, based on the popular comic of the same name, out in December. (“My way of having a little street cred with my children.”) But she has also entered her share of tortured souls. She recently finished shooting
Destroyer, a crime thriller directed by Karyn Kusama in which she plays an LAPD detective who must reckon with bad choices she has made in the past, also out in December. “That was a hell place to exist,” Kidman says. “I was completely in pain, to the point my husband was like, ‘I cannot wait for this to end.’”
As a Goodwill Ambassador for U.N. Women, Kidman has long been a behind-the-scenes champion of women’s rights, but she is becoming louder in her activism. In her best-actress acceptance
speech for Big Little Lies at this year’s Golden Globes, she broadcast her feminism to the world, touching on everything from domestic abuse to the power of female friendship. Some of these issues are baked into the first season of
Big Little Lies, even though the show and the book it’s based on predate #MeToo. (A second season, with
Meryl Streep joining the cast, has finished shooting.) But Kidman’s character, Celeste—who at once lusts for and lives in fear of her violent husband, played by Alexander Skarsgård—quickly became a part of the conversation about power dynamics and sexual and domestic abuse. “I think that’s just when culture and storytelling collide—probably storytelling igniting parts of it and unraveling parts of it. Domestic abuse, or any sort of abuse, and that misuse of power...it’s insidious,” says Kidman, who also received an Emmy for her role. “The day after I won, I was in San Francisco doing a fundraiser for domestic violence. It’s probably the Catholic in me, but as soon as there’s some sort of glory or you receive something, you then have got to immediately counteract it with giving back.”
Last October, following multiple allegations against Harvey Weinstein, Kidman publicly showed her support for “all women...who speak out against any abuse and misuse of power, be it domestic violence or sexual harassment in the workforce.” She didn’t reference Weinstein by name and made no mention of being harassed herself by the producer, but they worked together on many films, including
Cold Mountain,
The Others, and, most recently,
Lion.
Kidman traces her own feminism back to her childhood in the 1970s, when her mother used to make her and her younger sister, Antonia, hand out leaflets advocating for political candidates who supported women’s rights. “We’d get teased at school: ‘Oh, your mom is so radical,’” Kidman says. “At the time, we’d roll our eyes and be embarrassed. But my sister and I are both advocates now. It was an incredible gift to be given.”
For Kusama, seeing Kidman at work was a revelation. “Nicole the movie star exists, and that is one facet of her personal makeup,” the director says. “But another facet that now is becoming the prominent expression of who Nicole is, is Nicole the artist. It’s not that she’s giving up one thing for the other, but you feel that she’s embracing her role as an artist so fully and so completely. Between takes, I would approach her, and she would still be that character in a way. I would see her mind and her heart both working to explore something. And when you see an actor working at that level, it’s thrilling.”
These are the experiences that keep Kidman excited about making movies. “When I have the ability, I always choose to go back to that very basic, in-the-trenches filmmaking,” she says, eyes sparking like blue fire. And lately, she has stepped up her efforts even more to support female filmmakers and tell women’s stories with her Blossom Films production company. (With approximately 50 movies as an actor to her credit, she just signed a first-look film and TV deal with
Amazon Studios, which recently greenlit a TV series adaptation of Janice Y.K. Lee’s
The Expatriates.)
The movement has sparked debate on how we should look at art made by alleged abusers. “I look at those films that Polanski made, and they’re amazing. I’m sort of navigating through it myself with my own moral compass,” she says. “What do you do? Do you ban it? Or see it as art? Or judge it in this time looking back at that time? I have no answer.”
But she does have questions. One of her favorites: “‘What do you mean?’ And ‘I don’t understand.’ And ‘Teach me,’” she says. “Those are really important things to constantly be saying. I’m willing to learn. Since I was a kid, I’ve loved learning, growing, broadening, understanding, being challenged, being dissected. And I’ve had some of the greatest teachers in the world.”
The late Stanley Kubrick, who directed her in
Eyes Wide Shut, was one. “He came into my life and was like, ‘OK, I’m going to make a lot of your beliefs unstable right now for the reason of making you teachable,’ which is a great place to exist in,” she says. Campion, who directed her in
The Portrait of a Lady, is another. “One of the great minds,” Kidman says. “She’s got an enormous amount of wisdom.” The actress also tells a story about the late novelist Philip Roth, whose novel
The Human Stain was the basis for the eponymous movie in which she starred. As they were getting to know each other, she used to ask the author one persistent question: “‘But why, Philip?’” she recalls. “And he would go, ‘Nicole, Why is the worst question.’” He later presented her with a copy of
The Human Stain, which he had inscribed with the words “Why not?”
“I sort of live by that now,” she says, smiling. “Why not?”
source:
https://www.marieclaire.com