A window into the expat world: Nicole Kidman’s star turn in new series

Nicole Kidman stands out from the crowd in this six-part series exploring the lives of foreigners living in Hong Kong.

Clarke (Brian Tee), Margaret (Nicole Kidman) in Prime Video's Expats

Nicole Kidman wafts through Hong Kong. Tall, thin, blonde, impossibly pale, the actor may not be the last white woman in the metropolis but she certainly stands out in the crowd.

Are we set for a conventional tale of the voluntarily “displaced”, the expats dogged by the usual push-pull of the chosen land versus home?

As Australians, we are used to seeing the expat story through the lens of the Anglo-Saxons among us who headed for London and perhaps New York in decades past. Less familiar are the stories of younger generations seduced by China and other Asian posts. And while we’re a migrant nation, we rarely consider those who come here from the region as expats.

This six-part series from Amazon Prime Video, challenges those stereotypes while it takes a good close look at identity.

In this version of Hong Kong, circa 2014, everyone is an expat, living in his or her own special way in a bubble, whether it’s in the glamorous condominiums housing bankers and billionaires at The Peak; the Mid-Levels ; the business area of Central; or the market streets of Mong Kok. And the expats come in all ethnicities — Korean American; Japanese American; Indian American — all of whom can feel as alien as Kidman looks in this teaming city.

Expats, based on a 2016 novel, Expatriates, by American Janice Y.K. Lee (who was born and reared in Hong Kong) is one of the big releases for Prime Video in 2024. Kidman is among its executive producers and was one of the key drivers of the project.

It lives up to the hype — and banishes the controversy that surrounded Kidman, who was granted a Covid-19 quarantine exemption in 2021 to allow her to fly in and film.

Locals were not happy. In the end, the pandemic and other issues slowed the project which took 500 days of filming from April 2021 till December 2022. The difficulties of filming in crowded locations were so worth it: Hong Kong feels part of the fabric of the story, not a backdrop, and the cinematography captures both the frenetic public life of this city of more than seven million people and the restricted, constrained physical existences of its expats. It’s a film maker’s dream of course, but creator (writer, director, executive producer) Lulu Wang, has loved it to the max, mixing its shiny glassy wealth with its shabbiness to great effect. At times, the city is exhilarating; at times claustrophobic.

Billed as a thriller, there is indeed a mystery at its core but the real tensions are more domestic and emotional; Expats is about motherhood as much as about translocation; about the restrictions as well as the opportunities that marriage and children generate for the most privileged.

Kidman’s character, Margaret, is an American living petty happily in Hong Kong with her Japanese American husband, Clarke (Brian Tee) and their mixed-race children. Her best friend is an American (Hilary played by Sarayu Blue) whose parents are from the Indian subcontinent. Hilary is childless (and that’s an issue) and just hanging in with husband David (Jack Huston), a Brit who’s done the boarding school bit and is trying to manage a drinking problem along with a little midlife confusion about his place in the world. (There’s an excruciating scene when David is in the back seat of his chauffer driven car trying to establish a connection by asking about his driver’s children. Noblesse oblige, anyone?). Kidman too befriends a Korean American expat called Mercy (Ji-young Yoo) who’s a different class even if she has just graduated from Columbia; there’s genuine affection here but the connection proves devastating. (Another brilliant scene has Mercy on a boat cruise talking to other, richer, millennials. “Lucky,” one remarks when she says she’s a Columbia grad. “No,” she counters, “I just got the grades.” Ouch!)

So, Expats is a rich story with an excellent cast led by Kidman, and well put together. Watch out though for a little change of pace in episode 5, which is called Central, and is 96 minutes compared to the other eps of just under an hour.

This episode was released late last year at the Toronto Film Festival as a stand-alone feature. It’s good but it is so different that it’s worth knowing the backstory of its creation.

Creator Wang insisted on being able to make the special and show it at the festival before she would sign onto the project.

Toronto viewers saw a story about the “invisible” expats — the amahs and other domestic servants from the Philippines who live a sort of half-life in Hong Kong. These workers are intimately connected with the lives of their employers and yet so distanced. Central amplifies a key theme of Expats: the loss suffered as a mother by the Kidman character, Margaret. The Filipinas are mostly mothers too who also “lose” their children when they seek work in Hong Kong.

Wang explained her determination to make the longer-than-usual episode, telling an interviewer last year: “The first thing that I said when I was talking to the studio about this project was, ‘I am really honoured to do this series, but the only way that I’ll do it is if I can make this Episode 5, and it’s the first thing that I want people to see and I would like to screen it at festivals’.

“That was really like my entry way in because for me, growing up in America as a Chinese immigrant, that is a big part of my identity. And even though I went back to Hong Kong as an American expat, which is a very different identity, I wanted there to be two doors into this world.”

Expats is streaming on Prime Video Australia; two episodes were released on January 26, with new episodes launched weekly till February 23.