Snakes alive: Nicole Kidman exposes the wild side of her personality
For Vogue Australia magazine’s February issue, Nicole Kidman posed for iconic photographer Steven Klein alongside a snake.
Nicole Kidman – Australian icon, Oscar-winning actor and celebrated producer – wanted her ninth cover of Vogue Australia to be an unforgettable one. To achieve that, she teamed up with the legendary photographer Steven Klein, Vogue Australia’s editor-in-chief Christine Centenera and, in a photo shoot first for the actor, a snake.
Kidman loves snakes. Or rather, as she clarified with a laugh in her interview with the magazine, on sale Monday February 5, “I like them. I love my children, I love my husband.” But, yes, she does like snakes. “I think it’s something to do with the same way that I skydive or scuba dive,” Kidman explained. She thinks “they’re very beautiful”, finds them “alluring” and is fascinated by the way “they slither and move” and by the notion of shedding skins.
“You can try different things, all the time, which is what excites me,” she reflected in Vogue Australia. “I don’t even see it as reinvention. I think it’s more like different facets that you discover that are in existence, but you are attuned to the discovery of them.
“Yes, I remain very open and still very passionate about what I do, and curious. And those elements haven’t been dampened.” As she added: “You can either become more rigid as you become older, but you can also become more free.”
Speaking to the magazine on a rare evening of downtime, as she juggled two production schedules – one for an erotic thriller called Babygirl in New York; the other, a reunion with her The Undoing director Susanne Bier on a new television series called The Perfect Couple in London – Kidman reflected on the two sides of her personality.
She reminisced on sneaking into nightclubs as a teenager, “which, you know, everyone did, and everyone probably still does”. “I was thrust into it all at a very early age. But I wasn’t destroyed by it either,” Kidman said. Her mother Janelle often advised: ‘You can go and explore things and try things, but don’t lose your head.’ “But she never said don’t go and explore,” Kidman marvelled. “I’m grateful for that now. There was always those two things happening, where I was like, ‘I wanna be wild!’ And then I would have a strong family and nourishing home. I probably still have those two parts to my personality.”
Kidman will next be seen in Expats, her new Prime Video miniseries premiering tomorrow. Directed by Lulu Wang, the series follows Kidman’s character Margaret in the aftermath of untold grief, when her young son goes missing in the middle of the busy city.
“The resilience,” Kidman explained, is what aligns her to women in their darkest moments. Just think of Celeste in Big Little Lies, or in Rabbit Hole, the 2010 film about loss that was also the first project Kidman produced. “(Resilience is) one of the things I’m really fascinated by and drawn to, and have found in myself. It means that you have to go down before you can rise back up … But I am also deeply drawn to healing.”
Vogue Australia’s February issue will be on sale Monday, February 5.