When I first talked to Nicole Kidman in London in late August, we met in a curtained alcove of a blandly grand hotel restaurant in Mayfair. Decanted from a transatlantic flight—she had gone home to Nashville to settle her two teenage daughters, Sunday Rose, 17, and Faith Margaret, 14, into a new school year before returning here to finish filming Practical Magic 2 with Sandra Bullock—she shimmered in a white silk jacquard sundress and gold ballerina slippers. Her strawberry blond hair was drawn back into an elegant ponytail, and on one finger flashed an emerald-cut diamond: spectacular, spectacular, as big as the Ritz.
Kidman was eloquent and warm, leavening her more introspective thoughts with a twinkly laugh. By way of introduction, I mentioned that I often wrote about people in war, and she leaned forward to tell me that when she first took up her role as a UN ambassador in 2006, she had to be taught how to listen to the stories of women in Kosovo, many of whom had suffered sexual violence, because “I would absorb them to the point where I couldn’t even function…sensorily, emotionally.” As we went on to discuss trauma and suffering and telling stories, we fell into frank and easy conversation. Ten minutes flew by before I remembered I was supposed to be conducting an interview.
Kidman’s movie-star exterior is shiny, implacable, flawless, but inside is the soft stuff: intuitive, porous, sensitive. She often used the word open in describing herself. Her acting seems to meld the persona and the personal—a photogenic clarity and stillness that draws on a deep well of human emotion. Kidman said that Anthony Minghella, who directed her in the 2003 film Cold Mountain, once observed that she was “skinless.” “I’ve always remembered it,” she told me. “I thought: I’m not sure that’s good, but I look back now that he’s gone”—Minghella died in 2008—“and I sort of understand what he meant. It’s okay, but sometimes you’ve got to put on armor, to protect, when you are skinless.”
Kidman (journalistic norms would require me to add her age here, but Kidman told me she finds this trope “ridiculous and unnecessary,” so I will leave it out) began acting at 14 in her native Sydney. She moved from teenage stardom in Australian films and miniseries to front-row Hollywood, starring opposite Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder in 1990, marrying him and tabloiding through a decade of red-carpet triumphs, critically acclaimed performances, and inevitably a few box office flops. A divorce from Cruise, an Oscar for The Hours, and an engagement to Lenny Kravitz followed, before she settled down to married life in Nashville with Aussie country singer Keith Urban. Over almost 40 years, she has alternated between art house films and blockbusters, genre-shifting from Viking revenge to period drama, from taut thrillers, horror, family dysfunction to quirky comedy and binge-worthy, glossy TV. She has played Grace Kelly, Gertrude Bell, Lucille Ball, Martha Gellhorn, and Diane Arbus, and won awards too numerous to mention. Her production company, Blossom Films, founded in 2010, is thriving. Kidman’s career trajectory—up and up—has defied what was once expected of actresses over the age of 40, and defined a new generation of women filmmakers.
Kidman does not much like rest. “Taking a risk is what I’ve always done,” she said. Nor does she dwell on mistakes. “You get back up and you try again and you learn.” Her successes, acting or producing, allow her the scope to work on offbeat projects. “I still go back to shoestring indie filmmaking because it was where I was born,” she explained, “but then I can move into a big studio [movie] like Practical Magic, where you go, Okay! But that has an enormous amount of pressure and responsibility,” she acknowledged, “and how do you carry that load?”
Kidman and Bullock are both coproducers on Practical Magic 2, a sequel to their 1998 hit film about a family of witches. Kidman said working with Bullock again was “joyful,” and in a note to me, Bullock wrote approvingly that “it seems both of our mothers raised VERY independent women.” I suggested to Kidman that witchery was an old trope used to attack female empowerment, and she laughed in agreement and said that the movie’s feminism was “all wrapped up in a pretty bow, with margaritas!”
In 2017, after the success of the series Big Little Lies—which Kidman produced with her friend and Nashville neighbor Reese Witherspoon (“I can wave from my kitchen to her kitchen!” she said)—Kidman pledged to work with a woman director every 18 months. For years she had struggled to produce films, often buying rights and options herself. “Suddenly,” she told me, “it was like a golden road.” Kidman has exceeded her promise, working with more than 20 female directors in recent years.
“There’s a phrase I like to use: HBIC, head bitch in charge,” said Jamie Lee Curtis, a coproducer and costar with Kidman of the upcoming Prime Video series Scarpetta, about the forensic scientist from Patricia Cornwell’s novels. Talking over the phone from LA, Curtis described “the Nicole effect.” “You know in the military when people say: Attention! That’s how it feels.” Kidman’s involvement brought “a different level of seriousness, of complexity, of intensity.” Curtis has also seen her own success translate into opportunities; it was her option on the Scarpetta novels that she took to Kidman. “It’s a shift in the right direction, from a really very heavily male-dominated industry,” she said. “Clearly women are changing things.” Curtis pointed out that it was Kidman who fronted the well-known AMC cinema ads. “That’s not Brad Pitt or George Clooney or Tom Cruise or Ryan Gosling doing that. It’s Nicole fucking Kidman.”
As women actors are increasingly establishing production companies, roles have changed too. “It’s not the Madonna-whore anymore,” said Kidman. Her career has mapped the arc from male gaze to a female POV; a span bookended, to some extent, by Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which Kidman made with Cruise in 1999—a Homeric odyssey of sex and oddity (I admitted that when I first saw it, I had been nonplussed; “Actually me too!” Kidman said. “I was saying, ‘Well, Stanley, what does this mean?’ And he was like, ‘Don’t ever ask me that!’ ”)—and the recent Babygirl, written and directed by Halina Reijn, where Kidman plays a CEO exploring sexual submission to a much younger lover. “One ends with the word fuck and the other one ends with the actual action,” said Kidman, laughing self-mockingly, “and there is my career!”
Babygirl opens with Kidman’s character faking an orgasm. When she appeared fleetingly unrobed onstage in The Blue Room in London’s Donmar Warehouse in 1998, her performance was described, in the Telegraph, as “pure theatrical Viagra!” (she was nominated for the Olivier for best actress). In The Paperboy, made in 2012, a steamy noir set in 1970s Florida, Kidman pees on Zac Efron after a jellyfish attack; in Birthday Girl, a rom-com thriller from 2001, her character is into bondage; and in 2004’s Birth she infamously kissed a 10-year-old boy believing him to be an incarnation of her late husband.
“I don’t know,” Kidman said quietly when I asked why she was so often attracted to these kinds of parts. “Isn’t that weird that I don’t know why?” In reality, she is an introvert—but, she said, “sex is an important part of our lives and is still, a lot of times, taboo, and it shouldn’t be.”
Kidman describes herself as a character actor. Margot Robbie, with whom she worked on 2019’s Bombshell, about sexual harassment scandals at Fox News, told me: “I vividly remember seeing her act for the first time, on set. There is a force about her…. She just felt both very powerful and very weak at the same time, and that combo was extremely exciting to watch. I turned to whoever was next to me and said: That’s why she’s Nicole Kidman.”
I asked Kidman who her favorite characters were, and she quickly mentioned Satine in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and Celeste in Big Little Lies. “But I loved Grace in Dogville, strangely enough.” Dogville, from 2003, is an experimental Lars von Trier film shot on a stage set in which Kidman plays a woman debased and abused by the inhabitants of a small town. “I liked being part of a Brechtian play and the way in which Lars would challenge me on whether people were good or bad.” Many regard Dogville as her finest performance. “I love acting where it’s like, What is this? I can’t even mentally grab it,” she told me. “I love when I’m moving out of my own knowledge into a place of…it’s almost like free-falling.”
When Kidman was a child, her grandmother and her mother, both accomplished seamstresses, often made her clothes. “They’d stand me up on the table…doing the hem and checking the collar. And they could embroider.” The memories have given her a passion for fashion and an insider’s knowledge of great couture. Being fitted for a dress “makes me feel like I’m four,” she told me. “I feel pretty, and I don’t always feel pretty.”
Catherine Martin, the costume designer on Moulin Rouge! and Australia who, together with Luhrmann, her husband and collaborator, is an old friend of Kidman’s, told me, “If you are walking a red carpet, it’s a theatrical moment. It’s incredibly frightening to be under that kind of scrutiny and expectation.” Kidman plays the part to poised perfection. “I think it’s because she’s someone who is, at the heart of it, very shy,” said Martin. “She finds confidence in putting a role on—whatever the character she is performing.”
“She’s a presence,” the designer John Galliano told me. “There’s a magnetism that’s very rare. And of course when you know her a little bit, it’s doubly exciting because you know how naughty she can be.” He recalled the “wicked, wicked John Galliano dress, georgette, on the bias, divine,” that she wore in Eyes Wide Shut. In the scene where she comes home from a party, “it just comes off the shoulder,” Galliano said. “She flicked it with one nail and in less than a second the dress was on the floor. The chic! The chic!”
People are still talking about Galliano’s famous Absinthe dress for Dior, a fluid column detailed with chinoiserie embroidery that Kidman wore to the 1997 Oscars. Galliano told me: “I remember a hushed silence when she first appeared. She looked radiant.” And it proved a watershed moment, a dress that defined the red carpet’s evolution to runway and heralded the start of actors becoming ambassadors for haute couture.
Returning to what she’d said, I asked Kidman if fashion was armor. “Sometimes it’s armor,” she said. “Sometimes it’s playful, sometimes it’s sexy. It just depends on my mood. Sometimes it’s androgynous, sometimes it’s kind of, screw you.” Kidman told me she sees fashion as “a parallel artistic life.” Dressing up for a red carpet or posing for a photo shoot involves as close a collaboration with a designer or photographer as she’d have with a film director. In 2004, Luhrmann directed Kidman in a Chanel ad that was as sumptuous as one of his red curtain movies. This year, coming full circle, Kidman has been announced as a new face for Chanel to coincide with Matthieu Blazy’s debut collection. (And she sat front row at his show in Paris looking elegant in a simple white shirt and denim.) “There is commitment to having that piece of art portrayed properly,” she said of wearing fashion. When she worked with Steven Meisel for Vogue in 1999, re-creating John Singer Sargent portraits inspired by her role in Jane Campion’s adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Meisel made her look in a mirror to understand the shapes her body was making. “At first I was like: I don’t like looking at myself,” recalled Kidman. “He was like: You have to.” She snapped her fingers to illustrate, and then added, “and it was great.”
I asked about haters, judgment, online excoriation. “Literally walk away from it,” Kidman replied. “Because it will fell you. It will destroy you.” She counsels her teenage daughters to follow Taylor Swift’s advice and shake it off. Sunday Rose began modeling last year, walking the runway for Miu Miu. “It’s very frightening for me,” Kidman admitted. “[But] I started working at 14, so I don’t really have a leg to stand on.”
There’s little vanity. She told me she doesn’t mind being photographed bare-faced without makeup and likes her nose left red when she is crying in a scene. “I love the color of skin changing,” she told me. “I love flaws in the skin and I love real tears.” She is comfortable aging both up and down for a part. In 2018’s Destroyer, directed by Karyn Kusama—one of her indie films that was a critical success and a box office disappointment—she is almost unrecognizable playing a haggard, alcoholic cop. “And I’m about to do something where I’m going to look macabre,” she said, grinning. “I’m really excited.”
We were scheduled to meet again, in a bookshop—Kidman is a voracious reader (and currently in the middle of My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout)—but a close friend of hers died unexpectedly, and in shock and grief, she said she couldn’t do it. Later, talking by phone, she explained, “I was so vulnerable…. I’ve had a lot of sudden deaths in the course of my lifetime, which is awful.” Kidman comes from a close-knit family. Her father, a biochemist and psychologist, died in 2014; her mother died in September last year, on the same day Kidman was to be given the best-actress award for Babygirl at the Venice Film Festival. “Everyone was saying, You’ve still got to go and accept the award. And I just sat for a minute and I went, No, I can’t, I don’t, and I won’t.” Her ingrained discipline means it wasn’t easy. “My sense of duty and of being a good girl is so strong,” she told me, but, “at this age…I’m protecting myself when I need to. It’s my right—as Virginia Woolf used to say—it’s my right as a human being.”
Producing has also given Kidman increasing control. Scarpetta is shot in Nashville, “so I almost have a normal job when I’m there,” and she and Bullock wanted to film Practical Magic 2 in London in July and August so that they could have their children with them over the vacation period. The families had, she told me, a wonderful time. “Going to Hyde Park and concerts, Glastonbury and Salisbury—so much summer fun—Evita, seeing theater, walking Hampstead Heath, swimming there. Went to Portugal, went to Greece, had my nieces and nephews around, lots of family: my sister, my best friend since I was four, and her three children. A very tight group.”
A few weeks after we met, after this story had gone to press, news broke of Kidman s separation from Urban (she would file for divorce in late September). During our conversations I had guessed as much, but I didn’t want to pry. When I asked about how she felt now, in her 50s, I had expected to hear a nice trite response about the sagacity of age. Instead Kidman was wry, rueful, unsure of herself. She said: “How many times do you have to be taught that you think you know where your life is going and then it isn’t going in that direction?”
In Nashville, she told me, she leans on a close circle of girlfriends for support. She mentioned Witherspoon across the street, but also a senior oncologist at Vanderbilt Hospital (“I do an enormous amount of work for them, and I’m very aligned with them in terms of their cancer research”) and another friend who runs a hospital. “Ride-or-die friendships. Oh, yeah,” she laughed, grateful. The highs and lows of life, the losses and the pain, she said, are always grist for the artistic process. “I put it in my work. That’s the beauty of what I do. There’s a place for some of this to explode, implode, process, discover.”
She keeps a journal and writes down her dreams. Later, after reviewing them, she burns her notes. She mentioned this hesitantly: “I’m contemplating writing.” The idea was still too fragile to talk about, “but there’s a wealth of things I am compiling in my little psyche.” Kidman has never directed; there was never time. “Writing would be,” I said, “a departure.”
“Or maybe a necessity,” she countered.
A series, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, with Elle Fanning, will come out next year. A second series of Scarpetta is planned. Her production company has projects lined up like airplanes coming into JFK.
“So much to say and so little time to say it,” Kidman told me. “About death and life and joy and grief and loss and sex and why we’re here and what is truth and is truth even necessary.” Kidman laughed, delighted at the vastness of the universe. “Are we human?” she continued. “Are there parallel universes? What is the future? Do we even care? Are we living in a dream? What is reality? Where are we going? Why do I keep working?” she asked, emphatic. “Why stop? You’ll have to tie me down, tie me up!”
In this story: hair, Adir Abergel; makeup, Gucci Westman; manicurist, Cam Tran; tailor, Ella Ventress Bone.
Produced by REPRO Agency. Set Design: David White. Movement Director: Pat Boguslawski.
The November issue is here. Subscribe to Vogue.