I never thought I would live so long as to see Nicole Kidman become one of the most boring actors of her generation, but we are where we are. Her latest outing, Expats, is the latest in a long line of prestige television dramas in which she wafts about the place as an ethereal, privileged woman haunted by a secret sorrow that all the exquisite soft furnishings and beach views in the world cannot ameliorate.
We have had her as the queen bee of moneyed Monterey society cum victim of domestic violence in Big Little Lies; a bereaved therapist working through her trauma with a group of clients in a luxury spa in Nine Perfect Strangers; and, most recently, as a successful Manhattan psychologist who begins to suspect her loving husband of murder in The Undoing. In the third of those, she was outshone by her character’s emerald-green coat, the garment garnering more interest than anything she has done since Paddington, in 2014.
