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You know what, on second thoughts, Nicole Kidman would like to see the meat board. We’re in a white-tableclothed restaurant in London’s Mayfair, and our waiter is holding a wooden slab covered in various cuts of raw beef like an offering. Kidman has no intention of ordering steak. It is just past noon; she is sleep-deprived and only recently awake, but still somehow looks like she’s just emerged from the sea on an oyster shell. Nonetheless, she seems genuinely, hand-on-heart captivated by the beef. “I’ve never seen a meat board,” she says slowly, the words sounding foreign together. “Good lord, let me see it.”
The eager waiter runs her through the various cuts. We are his only customers, so he gives us the hard sell. “The Wagyu and Black Angus from Australia,” he says. “And the English filet mignon on the bone,” he says.
“Woooow,” she says. “Come onnnn!” Her eyes – large blue whirlpools – widen, as if watching a magician reveal the card she had placed deep in their deck. “That’s beautiful.” I think of Kidman’s much-memed AMC cinemas ad, where she’s sitting in an empty theatre, looking up at the screen like she’s locking eyes with the one true love of her life.
“Are you gonna have meat?” Kidman is talking to me now. I shake my head. “Yeah,” she laughs, telling the waiter, “I’m coming back here at dinnertime.” You could almost believe she’s not just being polite. He shuffles away, unsuccessful but satiated by the full Nicole Kidman experience.
It was jetlag that kept Kidman awake until 5am last night, finishing Miranda July’s novel All Fours (“Talk about raw”). She has just arrived in London from her home in Nashville via the Venice Film Festival, where she premiered her new film, Halina Reijn’s psychosexual drama Babygirl, to audiences for the first time. “[It was] terrifying,” she says. “But at the same time, thrilling.”
It was terrifying and thrilling because Babygirl, in which she plays a 50-something tech CEO in the midst of a BDSM-tinged affair with a 20-something intern, features her most vulnerable performance in years. Kidman says making it was even more challenging than 1999’s fabled erotic mystery Eyes Wide Shut, which, for the record, she shot for over 15 gruelling months (one of the longest shoots in film history) alongside cinema’s most notoriously obsessive director, Stanley Kubrick. “I’m in the whole film [in Babygirl],” Kidman explains. “There are so many close-ups. It’s a full stripping of me.”
Babygirl begins with a fake orgasm. In the first of many close-ups of Kidman’s face as happily married but sexually unfulfilled Romy, she is breathing heavily, letting out soft moans. It’s quite like any other climax you’ve seen on screen – maybe a little more believable than most. And then Romy dismounts her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), walks down the hall to another room, lies flat on her stomach, plays some “Daddy” porn on her laptop, sticks her hands down her pants and bites her jumper to muffle her moans as she takes herself to an actual orgasm.
That really is just the beginning. Romy’s intern Samuel, played by ascendant young Brit Harris Dickinson, seems to understand immediately that Romy is craving something beyond the placid marital sex she’s used to. At work drinks, Samuel sends her a tall glass of milk, unsolicited. He watches from across the room as she gulps it down in one, leaving white dollops on the corners of her mouth. Later, he gets her to crawl on the floor and lap milk up out of a saucer and then licks the rest off of her face. (“I love when he sends me the milk,” Kidman says.) When we see Romy climaxing for real with Samuel, it puts the fraudulence of the opening performance into sharp focus: a heavy, guttural moan that seems excavated from deep within. As Kidman puts it, it feels like the stuff of “home videos”, not something you send out to cinemas worldwide.
Reijn, Babygirl’s director, wrote the movie as a letter to herself. “I’m extremely confused and ashamed about my sexuality and about my body, and especially growing older, it’s not going away,” Reijn tells me. “The movie is a letter saying, ‘Please try to be a little bit more at ease with the beast inside you. To look at yourself and not be grossed out.’”
Kidman, 57, has exhibited bravery on screen before, but this feels like something else entirely. One of the film’s many close-ups is of Romy’s forehead being injected with Botox; the lighting is harsh, and you can see into her pores. “Why do you do that to yourself?” her on-screen daughter asks her. “You look like a dead fish.” There may not be anyone in the world whose face is more intensely scrutinised than Kidman’s. In Babygirl, she seems to be saying: Do your worst.
It’s a film intended to provoke strong reactions. Some might judge Romy; some might see themselves in her. Either way, it will make you think about the ways in which shame may have clouded your own sexual relationships. “Yes,” Kidman says. “That’s what Halina wanted.”
But when it comes to actually discussing any of this stuff – on a Monday afternoon? In a restaurant? With a stranger? Come on. “I can’t even talk about that!” says Kidman, wincing, when I ask if audiences still see a woman in her 50s masturbating on screen as taboo. So instead we avoid the subject, Kidman extolling the otherworldly benefits of cold-water swimming as I wonder if I can really bring myself to say the word “squirting” in front of Nicole Kidman.
…And Oh, thank God, the waiter is back, and he wants to take our order. “I’m gonna have the yellowtail…” says Kidman. “Do you have some oysters? Six would be great.”
I tell the waiter I’ll have the exact same.
“You what?!” she says with a sharp laugh. “‘I’ll have what she’s having!’”
In May 2003, Kidman was at another film festival – Cannes – presenting a different challenging indie movie: Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Two months earlier she had won an Oscar the old-fashioned way, playing an historical character with a big ol’ prosthetic nose (in this case, Virginia Woolf) in The Hours. Dogville is a three-hour avant-garde nightmare in which, on a bare black set where houses are delineated by chalk drawings on the ground, Kidman’s character Grace is repeatedly raped by numerous men, and in revenge incites mass murder. At the press conference, Kidman sat with her strawberry-blonde curls tied up, smiling in a black dress and a pair of cat-eye spectacles. Leaning back in her chair, she sparked up a cigarette, took a drag and exhaled, looking extremely fucking relaxed.
Back then, she seemed to be bulletproof. In just over a decade in Hollywood, she had carved out a space as one of the industry’s most versatile and bankable performers, an actor as equally at home in black comedies (To Die For) and superhero movies (Batman Forever), as she was in musical blockbusters (Moulin Rouge!) and freaky horrors (The Others). She was playing in the sandpit and thriving.
“She’s drawn to the radical, she’s drawn to the innovative, and she’s drawn to people who really inspire creatively,” The Hours director Stephen Daldry told me. A Vanity Fair profile from 2002 cites Kidman’s grit and commitment, rattling off injuries obtained on shoots: broken ribs, bloody knees, grossly swollen ankles. “She’s fearless,” Daldry continues. “I mean literally fearless. She will walk into a fast-flowing river and submerge herself as if to kill herself for real.” Watching her light up that cig at the Dogville press conference – as I do every time the clip resurfaces on social media – it’s hard to imagine that anything could rattle her.
A little over a year later, Kidman was at Venice premiering Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, a film in which she plays a widow who believes her late husband has returned in the form of a 10-year-old boy. Birth was dismembered by critics, with several citing a scene in which Kidman’s character bathes with said child in their outraged reviews. “[There were] lots of boos,” Glazer tells me over email. “Nicole was unshakeable in her support for it, though. She had a higher understanding of it than most people at that time. She remained composed. She didn’t get pulled around by any of that.”
Kidman was that rare entity: a blockbuster star who still understood the need for art to be provocative and to confront uncomfortable questions. She was curious – she still is. Her husband, the musician Keith Urban, jokes that she doesn’t do small talk. She’ll walk away from a conversation at a dinner party knowing what the person slathers on their toast as well as their biggest fear. “He’s like, ‘You found all that out?’” Kidman says. “And I go, ‘Didn’t you ask them that?!’”
In the years after Birth, however, her focus shifted somewhat. “I haven’t been the lead of a gritty indie film [in a while], that’s true,” she says. “I haven’t done a Birth for a long time.” Her life changed a lot in the mid-2000s. She started a family with Urban, whom she married in 2006, and had two daughters. “When Moulin Rouge! came out I was DJing at two or three in the morning,” she says. “I wouldn’t be doing that now. And that’s a choice.”
After Kidman turned 40, it began to feel like the industry was constricting around her. She found it harder to get roles that she was interested in, and feared she’d reached the “age cutoff” that so many women in Hollywood dread. Rather than quitting acting altogether (which she says she seriously considered), Kidman set up her own production company, Blossom Films, with the aim of forging a slipstream for herself and other female artists – writers, producers, directors – following in her wake. One of its first major wins was Big Little Lies, an HBO adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel about a group of wealthy mothers in Monterey, California, who find themselves embroiled in a murder case. In the years since, she’s perfected the beach-read-into-TV-crack pipeline, with shows like The Undoing, 2021’s Nine Perfect Strangers, and this year’s The Perfect Couple, which dominated the global Netflix charts for weeks after its release. No one does a white coastal elite whodunnit like Kidman.
“Nicole is incredibly well-read and really understands how to match directors to material,” says Reese Witherspoon, her Big Little Lies co-star and producer. “She watches an incredible amount of emerging filmmakers’ work and is very discerning about who she wants to work with. She’s also always willing to take on new challenges, particularly roles that explore a unique expression of female identity.”
What I’m getting at here is: Kidman could reasonably do a Perfect Couple per year for the next 20 years and leave it at that. So why is she taking creative risks right now – terrifying herself, even? Or, put another way: why has it taken her so long to return to the sandpit?
Partly, Kidman says, it’s that while she has wanted to do something in the vein of Babygirl for a long time, she hasn’t come across the right project. When she reads a script that she loves, a cog begins to turn inside of her. It happened with all of those wild swings in the early 2000s. “I don’t see them as daring, that’s the problem,” she says. “Not when I read them. I just see them as like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to make this.’ It happened with Birth. The same with [Babygirl], and Eyes Wide Shut. All of them. Dogville.”
Those scripts aren’t as common in the age of algorithmic churn. “It’s why there’s so few good films,” she tells me. “You don’t read ’em. They’re not financed, or they’re not found; they sit on shelves or on people’s computers; they don’t make their way into the world.”
But maybe the reason Kidman is doing this right now is less because of where the industry is, and more because of where she is as a person. Later in our conversation, we’re talking about the films that make her cry. Past Lives was a recent one, and Inside Out 2. “I cry, I do,” she says. “I consider myself open to emotions.”
It seems like your emotions are very close to the surface.
“More so now. Even more so.”
And then she goes off on a beautiful tangent about how hitting major landmarks in life over the past 20 years has connected her to her own humanity, and how the big black nothing comes into sharper focus as you hit your mid-50s and your kids grow up and your parents die. Why does she feel everything all the more now, at the age of 57? Well: “Mortality. Connection. Life coming and hitting you. And loss of parents and raising children and marriage and all of the things that go into making you a fully sentient human. I’m in all of those places. So life is, whew. It’s definitely a journey. And it hits you as you get older how –” she takes a sharp, dramatic breath “– it’s a wake up at 3am crying and gasping kind of thing. If you’re in it and not numbing yourself to it. And I’m in it. Fully in it.”
And you start to see that perhaps Nicole Kidman isn’t fearless at all.
Our waiter has returned, this time with two plates decorated with thin strips of yellowtail sashimi, and a ludicrously large silver vat of oysters. We both ignore the chopsticks and eat the sushi the undignified way: with a fork.
Kidman is talking about the process of acting. She doesn’t like to analyse her work too much (“The dissecting becomes icky. It feels a bit up yourself or something… Do you have that term here, ‘up yourself’?”). But while she feels a little queasy about labelling her process as “method”, she agrees that is probably the most accurate word for it. “I’m willing to go to whatever place to make it real and deep,” she says, “and certain things just click and it’s cellular.”
What this means in practice is that she has to really feel everything her character feels – otherwise, it won’t deliver the emotional gut-punch needed. “You can absolutely tell when people are phoning something in,” she says. “For me, that doesn’t work. I’m not moved by that.” When the camera stops rolling, she doesn’t just get to slip off her costume and walk away. Any negative feelings linger in her subconscious. “I get sick or I get disturbed,” Kidman says. “It penetrates my dreams, I don’t sleep well, I shake, I have all sorts of different physical manifestations from it.”
Kidman knows, of course, that it’s not real. But the effects can be. “Your body is just going, Oh right, this is happening, and I’m responding as anyone does to stress,” she says. So, when Kidman is exploring the psychology of a domestic abuse victim, as she did as Celeste in Big Little Lies, it can take its toll. “[It] was pretty shattering,” she says. “It short- circuits your brain.”
Babygirl affected her just like this. The nightmares, the middle-of-the-night heart palpitations. And it’s not all that surprising, having seen the film. Romy is hungry and horny and ashamed, and her desire is so great that giving into it could destroy her husband and devastate her children. That’s a lot for any subconscious to take.
Reijn has seen how this affects Kidman first-hand. “Seeing her act for me is like an exorcism,” she says. “She goes beyond ego, beyond sanity and beyond fear… It’s not that she’s not afraid, you know, she’s super afraid, but she still goes there.”
There’s a flipside to this process: sometimes Kidman’s life ends up feeding her work. Years ago, in a talk at the Women in the World conference in London, she said it fascinated her that her performances in the immediate aftermath of her divorce in 2001 were “applauded”. She was referring primarily to The Hours, for which she won the Academy Award. “One of the challenges that she had during The Hours is that she was in the middle of this emotional trauma,” says Daldry. “So she was especially vulnerable, she was especially emotionally available, and went on a real journey with me. I think one of the ways that she survived that process was to submerge herself into the world of Virginia Woolf and become obsessive about the work. I think it was a way to blank out the emotional trauma in her private life, investing all of that energy and all of that hurt into the role.”
Looking back, does she feel like her performance was impacted – improved, even – by the fact that she was going through such a difficult time? “That’s otherworldly stuff. I think that [was] my youth speaking,” Kidman says. “The subconscious and the subliminal is a weird thing.”
Or take Expats, Lulu Wang’s miniseries from earlier this year, in which Kidman plays a mother whose three-year-old son goes missing in Hong Kong. In the show’s most shattering scene, her character Margaret is presented with the body of a child in the morgue who matches her son’s description. Before the sheet is lifted, Margaret’s face melts into a Joker-esque fit of searing laughter. This was a bit of improv, inspired by one of the most difficult moments in Kidman’s life, when her father died in 2014. She had a similar reaction when she saw his body in the coffin for the first time. “I literally started laughing because I was so grief-stricken and so devastated,” she told Elle earlier this year. “My body and my psyche just couldn’t handle it.”
It’s not a choice, she says, but her own experiences do filter in. “It’s all there, everything is there,” Kidman says, between oysters, meaning, everything that she has gone through in life – the good and the bad – can inform her work. “[My emotions] have to be coming out in some way.”
Kidman laughs a lot. She laughs at the end of most of sentences. She laughs when I spend a little too long considering a question (“Because you go, ‘Hmmmm,’” she says, putting a finger to her lips and looking off into the distance). She laughs when the waiter drops some unsolicited miniature burgers down on the table (“Do you want a slider? Ahaha. Noooo.”).
As our plates are cleared, Kidman orders a skimmed-milk cappuccino. When it arrives, she administers a modest dose of sugar and proceeds to play with the froth, stirring the milk back and forth, into itself and over itself, licking the back of the spoon, eating what is ostensibly a beverage like an ice cream.
“I love wind,” she says. She’s looking out towards the edge of Hyde Park, watching leaves being whipped around.
You love wind?
“Yesss.”
What about it?
“I don’t know, I just love it. ’Cause it’s another force coming from somewhere else. And it comes in all different – sometimes it’s a breeze and sometimes it’s a tempest. I love it.”
In this moment, I say, it is impossible not to think of a particular Nicole Kidman meme (of which there are many): she’s probably in her early 30s, and she’s standing on the pavement in a pink top, basking in the sunlight, her eyes closed, her arms out, her mouth open as if she’s letting out a deep sigh of relief. Does she know the one I’m talking about?
“Yes,” she says. “That was not me; that was from a film, that wasn’t real life. I know that image!”
The story that goes with this meme whenever it circulates is that Kidman had just left her lawyer’s office after the dissolution of her first marriage. “That’s not true,” she laughs. “I’ve also seen the one where I’m clapping like that.” She begins to clap as I’ve seen her clap dozens of times in gif form, with her fingers pointed backwards and only her palms meeting. “’Cause I had a massive heavy borrowed ring on and it was really painful, and I was scared of wrecking the jewellery. Ha! There’s always something behind the actual images that go out there, right?”
What about the one where she’s stood, mouth agape, in the front row at the Oscars? The usual line – later debunked – is that this was her reaction to Will Smith slapping Chris Rock.
“Yesss,” she laughs again.
And then, of course there’s the aforementioned AMC ad, a “get back to the movies” plea filmed during the pandemic and subsequently held up by film Twitter for its endearing strangeness, which has solidified her place as a guardian of the cinematic experience.
“Yeah, yeah,” she says. “‘Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.’ But I’ll do anything for cinema, so you can meme me as much as you want.”
The waiter returns and places a plate of miniature chocolate-chip cookies on the table in between us. It sits there for a minute, untouched. “You don’t want a cookie?” Kidman says, with a smile.
I do, actually, but I’m not going to be the guy who beats Nicole Kidman to the cookie plate.
“That’s a line from the movie,” she says. “Don’t you remember it?” I realise she’s making a joke about a crucial moment in Babygirl, where Harris Dickinson’s Samuel upends the boss-employee power dynamic. I turn the question back on her.
“Sure, I’ll have a cookie.” She grabs one off the plate and breaks off a segment.
This year has seen a run of movies, including The Idea of You and I Want Your Sex, featuring relationships between an older woman and a younger man. Vulture has dubbed this the “New Milf Cinema”. Kidman has starred in two of them: Babygirl and Netflix’s A Family Affair, opposite Zac Efron. The two projects were filmed a couple of years apart, Kidman tells me, and the release proximity is incidental. Besides, she’s not bothered by people moralising about age-gap relationships. “My thing is, well, it’s been done for years the other way around, so really there should be a lot more of these stories,” she says. “It shouldn’t be, like, ‘What a shock!’ It happens. So let’s put it on screen. And that’s that.”
Hollywood in the post–Me Too era has struggled with showing sex on film (this has coincided with a 40 per cent drop in sexual content on screen since 2000, according to film data analyst Stephen Follows). But this past year, those winds seem to be shifting, with festivals once again stocked with films like Challengers, Queer, and yes, Babygirl, to which the depiction of sex is absolutely integral. Does Kidman feel like sex has a place on screen? “I’m not a huge fan of massive blanket statements,” she says. “No, you’re not gonna wanna sit there and see sex that’s exploitative. It’s gotta be looked at and dissected and it’s consent and there’s all those things around that. But we are human, and it is a huge part of who we are.”
Up to this point, we’ve been avoiding the meat of what made Babygirl so challenging for her. When we circle the specifics of the film’s more intimate scenes, Kidman steers the conversation towards praising her collaborators. It’s clear that she finds it difficult to talk specifically about her performance in the film.
“Yes!” she says, laughing again. “Can you tell? I don’t know what to say. But I love it. I love the film, so I don’t want to deny it or put it down. There’s times where you’re like, ‘I don’t love this film. We tried and it didn’t quite get there and I don’t love it.’ I love [Babygirl].”
She loves it, she tells me, “because of what it talks about and what it stands up for and what it allows people to discuss”, even when it is difficult. “I made it because in my body of work, I needed to do this,” she says. “It’s part of what I do. I’ve never shied away from sexuality on screen, ever… [Reijn] wanted to make a film about liberation, female pleasure. And I wanted to do that! I wanted to do that. ’Cause I’ve done a lot of films where I’ve been punished. I’ve done those films where you really don’t get the pleasure from it. Where you don’t get to see the woman actually go...” She exhales deeply here, a sigh signifying a release of tension. “A lot of times these films are very punishing. The woman gets discarded in the end or she gets turned around and she has to beg on her knees.”
It is not a movie that she could have made with a male director. “My skin changes colour in it. I blush, I sweat, and [Reijn] captures all of it because she understands it and knows it,” she says. During filming, Reijn would hold her – physically hold her – in between intensely intimate scenes when she felt too exposed. “That’s a very, very deep thing to experience. It’s a relationship where you go, ‘I trust you. Please don’t hurt me.’”
Dickinson saw how this anxiety affected Kidman on set. “I think we both were [scared] with every scene, regardless of intimacy,” he says. “And I think we were both always just like, ‘What the fuck do we do here? Like, how does this go?’ So, yeah, it was kind of reassuring to know that she was equally as troubled as me or scared as me.”
In her recent TV roles, like The Perfect Couple, Kidman has appeared icy and flawless – shot reverentially, decked out in wigs and make-up. But Babygirl strips off the veneer, showing instead someone whose armour has been removed, whose body and every insecurity are on full show. “That is vulnerable. Insanely vulnerable,” she says. “But I really would like to be able to open the door on this and not to be shamed, punished or hurt because of it.”
“You have to be very secure in yourself in order to do something like this,” says Banderas. “If you are even a little bit insecure it would be impossible.”
Susanne Bier, who directed Kidman in The Undoing and The Perfect Couple, noted this quality in Kidman, too. “She is devoid of vanity,” Bier says. “I think she doesn’t care about her looks. She’s obviously beautiful, but that doesn’t really interest her. And that makes her interesting as an actress because it means that she will go full-on [for] a part. She’d do anything.”
As you age as an actor, Kidman says, “the risk becomes deeper and harder”. An example: in 1998, right after filming Eyes Wide Shut, she performed in Sam Mendes’ The Blue Room at London’s Donmar Warehouse – an adaptation of the 1897 Arthur Schnitzler play La Ronde – in which both she and co-star Iain Glen appeared fully nude. She barely noticed the nerves: “When you’re really young, you’re just going, Oh, I’ll give it a go.” Conversely, starring in Anna Ziegler’s play Photograph 51 in 2015, she was overcome with anxiety. “I was terrified,” she says. “And I remember thinking, I didn’t feel like this when I was doing The Blue Room. What the hell is this feeling? And it was full-on nerves. So much more intense.”
Time does that to you. You become more aware of the consequences of failure. Kidman used to enjoy riding around on motorcycles. She smoked cigarettes, too. She doesn’t do either any more. With that in mind, would it be easier to just forget about the difficult stuff and continue to be Nicole Kidman in a digestible, six-episode-murder-mystery kind of way? What makes her want to keep doing this?
For once, she doesn’t laugh at all. “Wanting to be a part of the world,” she says. “Examining this life and why we’re all here and what it’s all about. I get to work with the most extraordinary people in the world, and share ideas and philosophies and be changed. God, why wouldn’t you wanna do it if you can?”
I’ll let Meryl Streep put it another way. “People call it bravery when an actress bares all and leaps off into the unknown, [when] she dives deep into the darker parts of what it is to be a human being,” Streep said in April, as she presented Kidman with the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award. “But I don’t think it’s bravery. I think it’s love. I think she just loves it. And I think that’s the greatest attribute an actor can have.”
Maybe Kidman really didn’t give a fuck in the early 2000s when she was making the kinds of movies that people booed at film festivals. But she’s not fearless any more – no one is, really, once life has made its mark. And that is perhaps why it’s taken her a while to get back in the sandpit, why Babygirl was more daunting than Eyes Wide Shut – because with each passing day, she feels everything more intensely: the fear, the embarrassment, the awkwardness of putting yourself out there. But she goes ahead and does it anyway.
There’s another Kidman meme that we didn’t get a chance to talk about. It’s a screenshot of a feature in the LA Times about Reese Witherspoon, an anecdote Kidman told the interviewer. They were passing time in make-up on the set of Big Little Lies. While Witherspoon wanted to grill her about working with Kubrick and Baz Luhrmann, Kidman had other things on her mind. “Do you ever think about dying, Reese?” she would ask. “’Cause I think about it all the time.”
And as a meme, completely out of context, that’s funny – sure. But from speaking to Kidman, there seems to be some real pain behind it. Her father’s passing in 2014, when her kids were still so young, made a mark on her. “There’s the mortality aspect of life which, when you start to deal with that, it’s very heavy,” she says. “When you’re raising children you’re like, I gotta stay here. I wanna see all of this. It’s devastating and beautiful and extraordinary.”
Several years after her father’s death, she was at home with her mother and they discovered a CD of her father singing. Her mother refused to listen to it, as she would find it too painful. But Kidman had to. “It was like being stabbed in the gut,” she told The New York Times. “I left it on.”
She can’t help but stare into the void from time to time. In fact, she makes a point of it. It makes Kidman more acutely aware of how important it is to engage with the world around her; and the best way she knows how to do that is through her art.
A week after our lunch, Kidman’s mother died, aged 84. The news broke as she was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. Accepting the award on her behalf, Reijn read out Kidman’s words: “The collision of life and art is heartbreaking. And my heart is broken.”
When we met, Kidman told me another story from a few days after her father died. She was with her daughters, who were four and six at the time. She was devastated and crying. “The little one was just so little that she didn’t know whether I was acting or not. She said, ‘Mummy acting now?’ And the older one was like, ‘No, mummy not acting now.’” She says this with a different, wearier laugh. “But the older one was like, ‘You won’t be sad in the morning?’ Because they don’t want a house full of sadness. Who does?”
It was a reminder that she needed to rally for their sakes. She needed to work through the pain. “And before you know it, you’re pushing through,” she says. “And by pushing through for them, you’re getting better. Because it goes on. That natural line of how it’s meant to go. The parents, then you, then the children. That’s the natural course. So if that happens, that’s a blessing.”
This anecdote led her to talk about Rabbit Hole – the 2010 indie film she produced and starred in about losing a child – and why she made it. It’s a fascinating choice, to have done that movie when she did. Because knowing how she works, she would have been going through hell. “I had to make it because I had my child, and I was like, ‘OK, now I’ve got to make a film that somehow deals with the most devastating possibility that other people have had to go through,’” she says. “It was awful making it, but I wanted to make it because there are people out there living that experience and I wanted to reach out to them and go, ‘Here’s something for you, and you’re loved and understood.’
“It’s a lifeline. Even Babygirl in a weird way is a lifeline. It’s like, it’s OK. It’s OK. You know? You can still be loved for the deepest parts of who you are.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of GQ with the title “Nicole Kidman Still Feels It All”
Styling by Katie Grand
Tailoring by Alison O’brien
Hair by Adil Abergel
Make-Up by Gucci Westman
Manicure by Emily Rose Lansley
Production assistant, Martin Eito