149When Big Little Lies debuted in 2017, it felt
revolutionary: five power moms from Mon-
terey who save their friend, Nicole Kidman’s
Celeste Wright, from a violent marriage. The
show, based on the novel by Liane Moriar-
ty, unknowingly prepared America for what
was to come. Less than a month after the 2017
Emmy Awards, in which the HBO series car-
ried home eight golden statues, the New York
Times and the New Yorker published their
exposés on Harvey Weinstein. A few months
later, the show’s five leads (Kidman, Laura
Dern, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley,
and Zoë Kravitz) were among the earliest sup-
porters of the anti-harassment initiative Time’s
Up. Two years out, we practically expect to
see women linked hand in hand—just as the
five actresses were as they marched onto the
Emmys stage—as a balm to a culture of casting
couches and White House diatribes. Big Little
Lies created that visual road map.
“Everyone says, ‘Are you going to do a sea-
son three?’” Kidman says. “We’re like, ‘Just
give us a sec.’” (She’s busy: After our interview,
she’ll be promoting the September release of
The Goldfinch, adapted from Donna Tartt’s
novel, in which she dons the country-club
cardigans of Mrs. Barbour.) Kidman hastens to
add, “We’d love to [do another season] because
we love being together, and it’s lovely spending
time with your friends, and with such good
material,” she says. “It’s part of the reason I
wanted to do Bombshell, to support Charlize.”
In Bombshell—next month’s newsroom
drama from Trumbo director Jay Roach
and coproducer Charlize Theron—Kidman
returns to the female-ensemble format to
chronicle Roger Ailes’s sexual harassment
of female staffers at Fox News. The movie
follows Gretchen Carlson (Kidman), Megyn
Kelly (Theron), and the fictional composite
character Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie) in
the year leading up to Ailes’s July 2016 resig-
nation. “The story it’s trying to tell is broader
than Fox News,” she says. “It’s much more
about sexual harassment and the women.”
When Bombshell’s 87-second video teaser
dropped in August, it racked up over 6.3 mil-
lion YouTube views in just four days. Bring on
the Blond Squad.
At the time of our interview, Kidman is in
Nashville, where daughters Sunday, 11, and
Faith, 8, have just returned to school for the
fall. When Kidman escaped to the heartland
in 2006, she’d just married Grammy winner
Keith Urban, a fellow Aussie, and was hot
off of a string of films teed up from her first
Academy Award, for her chameleonic por-
trayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours. “My
mom goes, ‘Don’t give everything up. You’re
going to need to keep your artistic juices flow-
ing,’” says Kidman, who at the time was five
years out of her 10-plus-year marriage to Tom
Cruise. “That was the thing that ignited me to
go, ‘Okay, why don’t I produce?’”
Produce she did, launching the company
Blossom Films in 2010 with fellow cinephile
Per Saari. After just three movies, they pro-
duced Big Little Lies, for which Kidman won
an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a
Limited Series or Movie. “Creatively, she’s a
big risk taker,” says Saari, with whom she’s cur-
rently juggling HBO, Hulu, and Amazon proj-
ects. When Moriarty suggested a new book
based around a remote resort, Kidman wanted
in. “Although we knew what the concept was,
that was acquired more or less sight unseen,”
Saari says. “Liane was talking to Nicole about
the seeds of a character and she embraced
it instantly, so Liane ended up writing this
extraordinary character for her.” (The result,
last fall’s novel Nine Perfect Strangers, was an
instant New York Times best-seller, and its
Hulu adaptation begins filming this spring.)
As Moriarty recalls, “Recently, we were
in Sydney talking about Nine Perfect Strang-
ers and [Nicole’s character] Masha, a trou-
bled, charismatic Russian woman, when
Nicole spoke in a flawless Russian accent.
Suddenly, for just a few seconds, Masha was
right there in front of me. It was extraordi-
nary—and then she was back laughing and
being her goofy self again.”
Kidman is protective of her process, but
does use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
to flesh out roles before filming begins. (She
doesn’t know her own personality type off-
hand, but the internet’s dubbed her the elusive
INFJ.) “I’ve done a little bit of it myself, but I
really use it for characters,” she says. “Once
they’re out there in the world, I love for peo-
ple to interpret them. Whether it’s actually
worked or not is up to the audience.”
These days, she’s restarting vocal training,
as she’s set to join the Ryan Murphy–verse
for an adaptation of Broadway’s lesbian rom-
com The Prom. “I do all my own preparation,
which I bring to set, and then you have to
throw all that out and be willing to try things,”
she says. “You hope the work you’ve done is
so layered and solid that it’s created a living,
breathing person.” ▪IN BIG LITTLE LIES, THE
ACCOMPLISHED ACTRESS
REINVENTED THE ONSCREEN
SQUAD. WITH BOMBSHELL, SHE’S
BACK AT IT. BY BRIANNA KOVAN.
STYLED BY NATASHA ROYT.NICOLE KIDMAN