Nicole Kidman enjoys power surge as producer on Nine Perfect Strangers
After finding fame in Hollywood as an actress, our Nicole is now revelling in highlighting local talent as a heavy-hitting producer.
Nicole Kidman is on storm watch. She’s in Sydney for the weekend to film a single scene for her upcoming series Nine Perfect Strangers, which she is producing and starring in, and a mega thunderstorm is predicted to lash the city.
“As producers we’re sweating that, we sweat all that. We sweat the weather. We sweat everything … I’m gonna limp to Christmas.” The pressure is on.
Even filming a show is an anomaly at the moment in an industry that has largely shut down due to the pandemic. The miracle is not lost on Kidman, who flew to Australia from her home in Nashville in April with husband Keith Urban and their children — avoiding a forced hotel stay to retreat in their Southern Highlands home before relocating to Byron Bay to begin filming Nine Perfect Strangers.
“It’s fantastic that we’re even able to do it. I’m so grateful that we have the permission, that the government rallied and got us the things that we needed so that we could produce this show … I humbly say it because we’re not through to the end and you never know what’s around the corner, as we all know.” The show, based on a story by Liane Moriarty, whose Big Little Lies, adapted by TV legend David E Kelley, was one of the buzziest TV events in recent memory when it premiered in 2017, is one of several projects Kidman has on the go right now as star, executive producer, or both.
She veers energetically from discussing shoot logistics to upcoming roles in productions by the likes of Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story, The Politician) and the imminent release of the highly anticipated six-part series The Undoing, co-starring Hugh Grant.
Kidman plays Grace, a self-assured couples therapist who is suddenly forced to confront what lies beneath the veneer of her happy marriage when a mother at her son’s school turns up dead. Grant, whom Kidman has known since her twenties, plays her oncologist husband, a collaboration she’s described as an “intense journey” made easier by the pair’s British-Australian connection.
Based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2014 book You Should Have Known (there are some clues in the title), adapted by Kelley and given the Scandi-noir treatment by revered Danish director Susanne Bier, The Undoing finds Grace realising she’s been gaslit by those around her and has deluded herself.
“David and Susanne … wanted it to be a thrilling ride. They would rewrite things and shape things, because they wanted there to be twists and turns at every corner,” Kidman says.
There’s certainly something of a pattern to Kidman’s roles — seemingly perfect characters whose lives are not what they seem, whether it be in the story world of Big Little Lies, or her brilliant turn as Suzanne Stone in To Die For, or as half of a troubled couple in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, co-starring her then-husband Tom Cruise.
“I’m fortunate enough to … always be exploring different areas of my life and my creative life, my artistic path,” she says. Further explaining her choices, she says: “I’ve always chosen projects for directors. I align myself with them, because I’ve got to feel safe. I’ve got to be able to open my emotional well to them. I’m in their hands.”
Bier, whom Kidman described as “remarkable … extremely bold and confident”, told The Australian earlier this month that the actor had “this uncanny ability to just access somebody else’s emotions, somebody else’s mind, somebody else’s physique. [On set], she would be walking differently. She’d be opening the door differently. Every single detail would be different.”
Kidman’s own complicated domestic past from her marriage to Cruise belongs to her earliest Hollywood incarnation, now firmly behind her. Today, joyfully married to Urban, she has embraced the transition to heavy-hitting producer which began a decade ago when she founded Blossom Films with producer Per Saari. “It’s a huge responsibility keeping these people … when you’re acting it’s one thing, but when you’re producing, the responsibility of keeping people’s health and keeping them safe, it’s a whole different level and skill set. And we’re learning as we go,” she says. “My brain is in producer mode right now.”
The Undoing has just had its virtual premiere, Kidman’s first, but “probably not my last”.
“We had all these huge plans,” she says of releasing The Undoing. “I had an interview with Paris and I thought ‘Oh, when will we ever get to (travel there) again?’ I don’t know’.
“But we’re able to Zoom. I did not know anything about Zoom before this year.”
Kidman’s company has also won the screen rights to upcoming series The Expatriates, based on a book by Janice Y.K. Lee, for whom they tapped Australian Alice Bell to write the screenplay after Kidman “spotted Alice’s work and loved it”. Carving out space for Australian talent is something in which Kidman revels.
While the cast of Nine Perfect Strangers includes plenty of international names, including Melissa McCarthy, Luke Evans, Tiffany Boone and Bobby Cannavale (husband of Rose Byrne), it also highlights some of our most promising stars, including Samara Weaving, “who’s fantastic”. Firmly on Kidman’s radar for the show was actor Asher Keddie.
“I went, ‘We’ve got to have Asher in the show. She’s an amazing actor. We’re getting her in the show.’ I showed her to David E Kelley and Jonathan [Levine], the director. We went to bat for her, and she’s doing exemplary work. It’s so fun to be able to do that.”
Unlike Big Little Lies, for which Kelley opted to shoot in Monterey over the story’s original location of Sydney’s Northern Beaches, one of the benefits to filming in Australia, Kidman says, is: “We’ve got actors who are playing roles they probably wouldn’t have got to play if it was filming somewhere else.”
And she sounds relieved to be in Australia during such perilous times. “I’ve been able to be here for my mother. You know, she’s 80,” Kidman says of mum Janelle, who has previously battled breast cancer. “She’s such a huge influence on my life. To have my sister here and to have our nieces and nephews, I think that sense of family and the strength and support of family right now has been extraordinary … And to also just be able to do the work — provide work, but also work.
“[I’m] grateful that I can be here with my mum. That was one of the primary things, that we wanted to be with our families. When we got here, they shut down the borders to Queensland.
“Keith’s mum is in Queensland, but it looks like we’ll all be able to spend …” — she stops herself, in that way we tend to do when looking too far into the pandemic. “I mean, who knows what’s going to happen at Christmas time.”
She adds: “I stay in a place of just day-by-day right now, because things can change on a dime, as we’ve all seen.”
The Undoing is screening on Binge from October 26.
