How Nicole Kidman became Lucille Ball for Being the Ricardos

Nicole Kidman sees her fearless approach to acting roles as both ‘blessing and curse’, but had rare second thoughts about her latest film role.

Nicole Kidman has never shied away from taking tough roles in challenging movies. But key always is that each role stretches a different side of her acting.

There’s the grieving mum Rabbit Hole, a dying courtesan in musical Moulin Rouge!, depressive poet Virginia Woolf in The Hours, hardnosed Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson in Bombshell, a cheap blonde floozy in The Paperboy, a downtrodden gangster’s daughter Dogville and a tortured widow in Birth. Then there was Bewitched, in which she dared take on one of the most beloved characters in American sitcom history.

Nicole Kidman spent long hours studying Lucille Ball’s work to nail her delivery and physical approach to comedy.

The home grown Hollywood superstar insists however that there is no master plan or formula when it come to the roles she chooses.

“It is better just to jump in and then deal with it. One of my tidbits of wisdom, jump in and think about it later,” she muses.

“I would love to be able to say I am incredibly brave and I take it on and I am take no prisoners, that is so not the case. I do not think it through.

“I think I have a screw loose where I am not able to go, ‘yikes, be careful’. I don’t have that, that is not part of my make up. So I have this, what I call teenage decision making, still where I am like, ‘yeah, I am going to give it a go’. It has never changed. It is ridiculous and (husband) Keith (Urban) always says, ‘you literally just don’t think it through’. It is a blessing and a curse you know.”

Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem in a scene from Being the Ricardos.

Kidman, who flew home to Sydney on Friday, was no different in her approach to her latest project, Being The Ricardos. In another of those act first, think later, jobs for the Academy Award-winning star she signed on to play another television giant in comedian and 1950s sitcom superstar Lucille Ball, opposite Javier Bardem as Ball’s husband and co-star Dezi.

But this time the 54-year-old did have doubts, recently admitting she nearly pulled out of the movie after fans questioned her casting, largely because they thought she didn’t look enough like the I Love Lucy star.

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in scene from I Love Lucy.

“When the reality of playing (Lucille) hit me, I went, ‘what have I said yes to?’ ” Kidman recalled in a recent US TV interview on Live With Kelly and Ryan. “To which I then went, ‘Oh no, I’m not right. Everyone thinks I’m not right, so I’m going to try to sidestep this.”

Fortunately she stuck to her game plan. Speaking to Insider ahead of the December 21 Amazon Prime Video release of Being The Ricardos, Kidman is excited by the hugely positive response early screenings have garnered from critics.

Ball’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz, has also heaped Kidman with praise after seeing the movie that also stars Nina Arianda, J.K Simmons and Tony Hale.

“Nicole Kidman became my mother’s soul,” Arnaz said on Instagram. “She crawled into her head – I don’t know how you do that. She cared very deeply about this part, it shows and I believed everything she said. She looks beautiful, thank God they didn’t do exact lookalikes, I couldn’t have taken it.”

Director Aaron Sorkin and Nicole Kidman on the film set.

Some have suggested Kidman could score herself another Oscar for the film.

“I am actually glad I didn’t realise, as it is with anything in life it is better not to know ahead of time what you are going into,” Kidman now says. “As it unfurled in front of me, I was like, ‘this is pretty extraordinary but yikes I better start putting in the work’. And then I started doing the work, just a crazy amount of hours fastidiously working on the physicality, on the voice, on the movements, just learning the words, and it was all in the middle of a pandemic so it was all over Zoom.”

Nicole Kidman with her Being The Ricardos’ co-star Javier Bardem at the premiere in Los Angeles.

Kidman is home for some Christmas downtime with her family and on Wednesday will walk the red carpet for the Australian premiere of Being The Ricardos at the Cremorne Orpheum.

Acclaimed writer/director Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, The Newsroom, The Social Network) asked Kidman to play Ball in the production which focuses on the complex relationship between Ball and Arnaz, on and off the screen.

I Love Lucy, in which Ball and Arnaz played Lucy and Ricky Ricardo respectively, was a global smash hit, running for six seasons and 180 episodes from 1951 to 1957.

It was shot in front of a studio audience, won countless awards and was hugely popular. In the US alone, more than 60 million people would tune in to watch each episode. Re-runs are still played around the world today – a colourised version of the I Love Lucy Christmas episode attracted an audience of more than eight million people in the US when screened by CBS in 2013.

Kidman has been applauded by Ball’s daughter for having ‘crawled into (Ball’s) head’.

“She was an amazing comedian and I did not know that she was so much a part of actually constructing the whole thing, that was all her,” Kidman explains.

“The writers on the show were great but she would work it. She was a hard worker, I had no idea that she wanted to be a movie star, was only sort of really in the B movies and then went into radio and then went into television. Then the show was such a mammoth success, like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetime.”

It was not easy playing one of Hollywood’s most revered icons.

Kidman was working in Australia when Sorkin rang her with the proposal to play Ball.

“I said yes because it was him and because it sounded amazing and because I had read the script. I didn’t realise how much work it was going to be and how hard it was going to be.”

That work included watching many hours of footage, a lot of reading and talking to those who knew Ball, who died in 1989 at the age of 77.

“It was just a mammoth climbing of the mountain,” Kidman says.

“Because it is two characters, there is Lucy Ricardo and Lucille Ball, so I had to watch all of Lucille Ball and I was given access to some really behind-the-scenes footage and documentary footage. I watched a lot of her interviews and the way her hands moved. And then I watched her films, which I had not seen, and then read a lot of things.

Nicole Kidman describes Lucille Ball as “complex”.

“And then actually started talking to Lucie Arnaz as well, who gave both Javier Bardem and I secret recordings of her. Once we got on set, it was like a bullet train. We had so much to shoot in such a limited amount of time but luckily when you are dealing with a writer/director, he has got a strong grasp, he knows what he wants.

“And because Aaron (Sorkin) comes from that sort of West Wing and all of that television, he knows how to go fast. But he also made me a promise before I started, he said: ‘I will not walk away from the set unless I know I’ve got it’.”

Kidman describes Ball as “complex”.

“I just think she wanted to do great comedy and I think she also wanted a home, which is a very strong theme of this film, wanting a home. She wanted kids, and Desi really got her, he really protected her.”

Asked what a movie about her own life would look like, Kidman laughs.

“It ain’t over yet. I hope there is a lot more to come.”

Being the Ricardos premieres on Amazon Prime Video December 21. Nicole Kidman will walk the red carpet for the Australian premiere at Cremorne Orpheum on Wednesday.