Actor Lily Rabe on what it’s really like to work with Nicole Kidman

American actor Lily Rabe describes how to spot an Aussie on set and what it’s really like to work with Nicole Kidman.

Motherhood changed Lily Rabe, and not just in the most obvious and clichéd ways.

For the past decade, the New York-born actor has starred in all but one season of the wildly off-kilter anthology TV series American Horror Story, playing characters as varied as a demonically possessed nun, a swamp-dwelling witch and even real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

Hardly light material, but if Rabe ever struggled to switch off after a long day of shooting, her two young daughters put paid to that. “It’s a wonderful and inarguable fact that when your kids need something from you, everything else goes away,” Rabe tells Stellar.

“I have so many Australian connections through work.” (Picture: Tiziano Lugli)

“Nothing in my experience makes me so immediately present. But something I talk about with other actors is that acting creates a lot of adrenaline. You can film a scene, then it’s not until two days later that suddenly your neck goes out – it can stay in your body in ways you don’t realise.”

And that goes double for the 38-year-old Rabe who, as the daughter of playwright David Rabe and the late actor Jill Clayburgh quite literally has the craft in her blood. “[Growing up] they were both such creative people – and I think about that a lot now as a parent,” she says.

“I realise how much their love for what they did was part of the energy in the house.” For much of her childhood, first in New York and eventually Connecticut, Rabe studied ballet before eventually deciding to follow her mother’s lead and embark on an acting career, which has since spanned film, TV and theatre.

Clayburgh, a two-time Academy Award nominee who died in 2010 after privately battling leukaemia for more than 20 years, was widely loved for her star-making role in An Unmarried Woman, a 1978 film with a legacy as a feminist touchstone that has only grown over the years.

“Acting creates a lot of adrenaline.” (Picture: Alamy

“I could sense at a young age how personal it was for women,” Rabe says.

“I remember being a little girl and people would come up and tell me, ‘I just have to tell you what your mother means to me…’ But she never saw herself in that light. It wasn’t who she was to think of herself like that. She was an incredible actress and an incredible mother.”

Rabe now lives in Los Angeles with her partner, actor Hamish Linklater, but she admits that it’s “a place where I don’t drop my shoulders in the same way as New York. It’s never quite felt like home in the same way.”

Still, she made her way back to her hometown in late 2019 to film a pivotal supporting role in the HBO mini-series The Undoing, as a gossipy Upper East Side mum and friend of Nicole Kidman’s character Grace. Rabe, who had never met or worked with Kidman before, is nothing short of effusive about the actor.

“I loved working with Nicole; it couldn’t have been more wonderful. She’s incredibly generous.”

“It’s definitely down and dirty.” (Picture: Supplied)

The hit series also reunited Rabe with Australian producer Bruna Papandrea (“fearless… the best there is”), who’s also behind her latest series, the drama-mystery Tell Me Your Secrets, in which she plays Emma, a troubled woman who has entered witness protection and is grappling with the trauma of her past.

“It’s definitely down and dirty – her wardrobe is very different from [The Undoing],” says Rabe, with a laugh.

The show sees her working with more Aussies, including actor/director/producer John Polson and Xavier Samuel, who plays a love interest. “I have so many Australian connections through work,” she says.

“I recently worked with Damon Herriman, too, and they all seem to know each other. I’m doing my best to keep collecting and working with as many Australians as I can.”

When asked if she’s noticed the Aussies’ famously egalitarian behaviour on sets – eating lunch with the crew, making their own coffee – Rabe replies, “That’s something I value so much – a certain ethic, a feeling of community and no hierarchy. I’m very attracted to that and it makes me feel comfortable. So yes, it does line up with my experience… because I’ve never worked with an Australian and not loved it.”

Lily Rabe features in this Sunday’s Stellar.

The same can be said of Linklater, who is also frequently her co-star, including in Tell Me Your Secrets, along with Amy Brenneman. When Stellar points out that mixing work and pleasure can be fraught, she sparks up, her cadence quickening as she argues the opposite.

“For some people it can! But it’s how we got to know each other, by working together.

“All I know is that I treasure working with him – to the point that we’re trying to make and create things to be in, and not just hope that people cast us together. Because there’s no getting around the truth when you act with a partner. We’re not going to be delicate about it – we’re just going to say it.”

Tell Me Your Secrets premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Friday.

MORE STELLAR

What Leo really thought of Romeo + Juliet

How a Home And Away star landed Jodie Foster’s coveted role