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One of Kidman’s more frequent employers was Harvey Weinstein, who produced “The Hours,” “Cold Mountain,” “Lion” and several other films on her résumé. He is now standing trial in New York on sexual assault charges, and dozens of high-profile women have accused him of raping or abusing them on movie sets. Kidman wasn’t one of them. “I knew very little,” she says of her exchanges with Weinstein, which she describes as “intermittent” between projects. Kidman recalls how Weinstein would try to control her publicity commitments. “He would get angry. My recollection of Harvey was never anything other than ‘Nicole, do this.’ I purposely kept my distance.”
With all her film roles, the part that she feels has made the biggest impact is that of Celeste Wright in HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” which she produced with Reese Witherspoon. “That’s the character people talk to me about more than anything else,” Kidman says. “It’s probably the most commercial thing I’ve done in my whole career.” The show reminded her that she’s not a good judge of her own work. “When I saw the therapy scene, which people really responded to, I thought I was terrible,” Kidman says.
“And everyone was like, ‘No, no!’ I think it was because I felt too exposed and vulnerable. It was probably too much for me to see.”
On the night of this year’s Golden Globes, after winning the trophy for best TV limited series, Kidman and Witherspoon received an email from Meryl Streep. “She goes, ‘I suppose now I have to join you.’ And we were like, ‘What?’ The two of us were just shocked.” Streep signed on without a script. “She hadn’t even read it,” Kidman says. “That’s how much she wanted to support us.”
Streep plays Kidman’s mother-in-law in the upcoming season of “Big Little Lies,” so the two actresses share many scenes. “I was terrified,” Kidman says. “You’re acting opposite the great one. I get nervous anyway — but to be opposite her and not want her to think, ‘Who is this amateur?’ And also, we want to deliver a series for her that she’s great in. Reese and I were like, ‘We want this for her and for the other women.’ They have much stronger roles in the second one.” Would she be open to doing a third season? “I think it would be hard to get the whole group together,” Kidman says. “But we would love to do it.”
Nicole Kidman has always led a life marked by a certain duality. She was born in Hawaii, to parents who were there studying on student visas. Her family moved back to Sydney when she was 4. Growing up, she used to sit with an American flag in one hand and an Australian flag in the other. “I had American citizenship and Australian citizenship,” Kidman says. “I was both.” She learned from her mother, a staunch feminist, not to put her dreams on hold. “My mom became a nurse,” Kidman says. “She wanted to be a doctor, but they didn’t have the money, and she didn’t have the confidence and the opportunity. She would have been a great doctor.”
Kidman started taking acting classes in high school and landing stage and TV roles in her late teens. Playing a neurosurgeon who falls for a race car driver in 1990’s “Days of Thunder,” opposite future husband Tom Cruise, introduced her to U.S. audiences. “I moved here because I fell in love and got married,” Kidman says. “I always make choices for love, and everything kind of had to fall in place around that.” In retrospect, her life with the biggest movie star on the planet didn’t make her feel like she was living under a magnifying glass. “If I look back, it actually didn’t seem like a lot of interest,” she says. “We didn’t have social media then. We didn’t have paparazzi like now. You had definite control of it.”
Jackman tells a story about how she’s always been a daredevil in her personal life. “Did you know she can jump out of a plane at 10,000 feet?” he says. “I think one day she did it like six times. She and Tom used to do it. She loved it.” Not always. Kidman says she was struck with terror as she plummeted to Earth. “That’s the crux of my personality,” she says. “Standing there, just going, ‘I want to,’ and then ‘Oh, no, no, no’ and just jumping anyway.”
Kidman is still taking big plunges in her career. Even by her own standards, “Destroyer” is a departure, a gritty crime thriller revolving around a protagonist with demons. Kidman cried the first time she read the script. “They were considering someone else for the role,” she says. “Then the other actress didn’t want to do it. I was like, ‘I want to.’” Kusama provided her with reference points for portraying Erin Bell. “I sent her videos of coyotes running through the streets of Los Angeles,” the director says. “She talked a lot about shame, what it does to your body and mind. I realized a couple of things. One, she was going to fully embody the character in another physicality. And I knew she was going to bring a humanity to the character.”
Kidman pushed herself to get into Erin’s mind-set. For starters, she went to a shooting range in Tennessee and trained with a military veteran to learn how to handle assault rifles and other guns. “All of the weapons, I can load them, I can fire them, I know them,” Kidman says. “I trained for about a month, but every day. It was cold, and I was tired, and I would just train. And my hands cramped, because I don’t have big hands and I don’t have strong hands. It was awful.”
Kidman enjoys her life in Nashville, a world away from the pressures of Hollywood. She and Urban recently ventured out to see “A Quiet Place” (which made them go home and hug their kids) and “A Star Is Born” (which made them sob). Although she tries not to re-watch too many of her own films, she recently caught “Australia” on TV with her family. “I love that movie,” she says, referencing the mixed reception when it first came out. “I think what happened with that, there was an expectation for it to be a particular type of story.” But her kids gave her the thumbs-up. “They were, like, spellbound by it. That was really nice.”
As she looks ahead, Kidman wants to keep surprising herself — and audiences. “I like not predicting myself,” she says. “I like not knowing where I’m going to go next, or what’s going to happen.”
Kidman plays a far different role in “Boy Erased,” portraying a mom who drives her son (played by Lucas Hedges) to a gay conversion therapy center at the urging of her husband (Russell Crowe). She discovered a way to empathize with her character, even though she found the notion of trying to “cure” a gay person despicable. “I hate that she did that,” Kidman says. “But at the same time, she didn’t do it out of maliciousness. She thought that this was going to help him.”
With “Aquaman,” Kidman returns to the comic book genre for the first time since 1995’s “Batman Forever.” She accepted the challenge because she wanted to work with director James Wan. She gets giddy when describing her latex costume: “It was covered in what looks like scales, but it’s not scales.” She’s hesitant to reveal too much about her character, outside of one pivotal scene. “I ate a goldfish in the movie,” she says with a smile. “My kids were thrilled.” She pauses to clarify that, despite her Method acting tendencies, it wasn’t a real goldfish. “It was fun, and I love my hair — that long, cascading, to-my-bum hair.”
Kidman hasn’t paid attention to online chatter that she’s too young to play the mother of Aquaman actor Jason Momoa, who is 39. “In the context of the superhero world, it all evens out,” she says. “Atlanna doesn’t really age.”
She developed a limp and wore prosthetics on her face, including on the bridge of her nose, but she doesn’t want to detail all of that. Kidman thinks it will take the audience out of the movie. She admits that the trauma of the role weighed on her. “I was very, deeply depressed,” she says. “It was the point where my husband was like, ‘When the hell is this going to end?’” When Urban saw a finished cut of the movie, “he was weirded out,” Kidman says. “Wouldn’t you be weirded out if you were married to one person, and they show up looking like that?”
source:
https://variety.com/2018/film/features/nicole-kidman-destroyer-big-little-lies-aquaman-1203032454/