In the television series The Perfect Couple, which had its UK premiere last week, it is said of Nicole Kidman’s character, Greer: “You never know where you stand with her … I mean, beneath her, for sure.”
That moment seems to break the fourth wall and refer to the 5ft 11in actor herself, a regal, mercurial film star who, decades into her career, remains at the height of her powers.
This year alone has seen Kidman floor the Venice film festival with erotic thriller Babygirl, for which she won the best actress award last night, as well as star in The Perfect Couple, play the lead in and produce melodic tragedy miniseries Expats from Lulu Wang, and fall for a movie star played by Zac Efron in A Family Affair. Still, she has spoken of doing more, including wanting to star in a “hardcore” horror movie one day.
Whether or not fulfilling a lust for gore comes to pass, there is little else left for Kidman, 57, to tick off her cinematic bucket list. She has won Emmys, Golden Globes, a Bafta and an Oscar ; been in musicals, thrillers, superhero movies and comedies and worn questionable prosthetics in multiple biopics.
She starred in and produced one of the best female-led ensembles of peak television with Big Little Lies and has done so while maintaining a sense of artistic integrity. The idiosyncrasy of her filmography shows an actor uncompromising in their artistic interests, rather than pursuing Oscar-bait or brazen cash grabs.
Her latest, Babygirl, from Halina Reijn, the Dutch director of Bodies Bodies Bodies, was written with her in mind. The film harks back to the era of the erotic thriller while being firmly of the feminist now, seeing Kidman’s glamorous CEO caught up in a kinky love triangle with Antonio Banderas and Harris Dickinson.
It doesn’t flatten Kidman into the role of effortless femme fatale but rather nakedly depicts an inner turmoil and the lengths required to keep up her glamorous facade.
Skin-tight outfits are wrestled into, botox liberally injected and a litany of plunge pools, light therapy and cryotherapy employed to keep up an appearance of serenity.
As the complex dynamics with her husband and lover become increasingly messy and raw, Kidman proves once again why she is one of Hollywood’s best and subtly most transgressive stars.
The Australian actor made her first tentative steps towards stardom trapped on a yacht with Sam Neill and Billy Zane in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm and coming of age alongside Thandiwe Newton in a 1960s boarding school in 1991’s Flirting.
She received even more global attention starring alongside her future ex-husband in Days of Thunder, which briefly threatened to have her labelled “Mrs Cruise”.
Rather than be content to play the glamorous love interest of the leading man both on and off the screen, however, she followed up a thankless romance with Batman with the gloriously twisted To Die For, which satirised the narrative around sexually liberated ambitious women and skewered the tabloid obsession with them.
One of her greatest roles would also be one of her longest shoots, when, alongside Cruise she spent two years on Eyes Wide Shut. She might be the only person who left a Stanley Kubrick film wishing it had gone on longer, telling the BBC in 2022: “I would have shot that thing for five years, I didn’t care … I’m with the greatest film-maker.”
Eyes Wide Shut, released in 1999, hit the headlines for its explicit masked orgy scenes but is rightly regarded as a masterpiece.
Kidman’s monologue about her dissatisfaction with monogamy, while smoking a joint, is her finest in a career packed to the rafters with powerful monologues.
Corrina Antrobus, film critic, Bechdel Test festival founder and author of I Love RomComs & I Am A Feminist, says: “If you look at Eyes Wide Shut, it’s the end of the 90s, a paparazzi-filled awful time for objectifying women. Things like Hello! were at their peak of selling us this fantasy of the perfect marriage, of selling your wedding for millions of pounds, but here you had Tom and Nicole – a bona fide Hollywood couple – breaking the fantasy and daring to present a woman with desires of her own.”
At Babygirl’s press conference, Kidman explained: “I approach everything artistically, so I don’t think of the minutiae, just how do I give over to this character fully without censoring my director.” In the case of that film, it requires a level of bravery not accessible to most actors, both in sex scenes that centre female pleasure and in playing a powerful CEO for whom cosmetic enhancements and psycho-sexual torment are willingly endured.
Despite her many head-turning appearances on the red carpet, dense filmography, a high-profile marriage to Cruise which ended in 2001 (the moment of its dissolution captured in a memorable paparazzi image of seeming euphoria), a subsequent marriage to the country music star Keith Urban and many charming talkshow appearances, there has always been something unknowable about Kidman. In all senses, she exists above the fray, living a life that we only get the briefest or most curated glances of.
She rarely speaks about her private life, and concealed an engagement to the rock star Lenny Kravitz for years. But the peeks we do get are fascinating.
In a moment that reportedly inspired one of the most quoted lines in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Kidman sat down with her Big Little Lies co-star Reese Witherspoon, who was expecting to chat movies, and instead asked her: “Do you ever think about dying Reese? Because I think about it all the time.”
As an actor, she is continually revealing new depths. Antrobus says: “Everyone knows she’s got the skills, but I think there’s conscious decisions in making sure that people don’t forget how multi-faceted she is. While she’s somebody that can be seen as uptight, she just unravels so erotically and beautifully. Seeing a woman unravel themselves like that continuously and shock us and entertain us and surprise us is her theme, somehow.”
It’s a career not without its missteps – remakes of The Stepford Wives and Bewitched rightfully sank without a trace – but most actors could only dream of having the kind of cultural impact Kidman is capable of achieving in a few months.
In A Family Affair, her first proper romantic comedy leading role, she has once again moved the needle. As Antrobus puts it, “Family Affair is a really smart move.” The film was released on Netflix in June. “It’s a modern romcom that delivers a sliver of justice to films that haven’t exactly been kind to the portrayal of motherhood. It has a representation of a mother as a woman with unapologetic needs, with sexual needs that sees a woman navigate what I think is a very genuine rite of passage in accepting that it’s now time to serve herself.”
In serving herself, Kidman doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon. Seven further projects listing her as a producer have been announced, Big Little Lies is set to return for a third season and a long-awaited adaptation of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books will feature her in the titular role.
Awards buzz around Babygirl is building after last night’s success and, while it remains to be seen if that role will prove too disquieting for the Oscars, Kidman has already won the long game. Whether she is playing a glamorous writer living in a Nantucket mansion, a mother falling for a hunky young movie star or a kinky robotics CEO straddling Harris Dickinson, it has never been more exciting to be beneath Nicole Kidman.
• This article was amended on 8 September 2024. An earlier version said that Halina Reijn was Norwegian when she is Dutch. It also said that Nicole Kidman has won Oscars and Baftas; to clarify she has won one of each of these.
