n
icole Kidman is on a mission
to do more comedy. “Some-
thing slapstick or physical,”
the actress says. “I’ve not had
the opportunity to play roles
where people laugh much.”
She won an Oscar for her decidedly
unfunny performance as Virginia
Woolf in The Hours, but in her latest
film, Being the Ricardos, she shows her
range — playing sad and hilarious.
Kidman is the original 1950s funny
girl Lucille Ball. She enjoyed working
with the film’s writer, acerbic
zinger king Aaron Sorkin. “I got a
hit out of that,” she says, speak-
ing to me from Australia, her
home. “It goes straight to
the bloodstream hearing
people laugh.”
Ball was the most famous
person in the US, star of thechirpy sitcom I Love Lucy, which at its
peak pulled in 44 million viewers in the
US, almost three quarters of the audi-
ence; incomprehensible now. The film
centres on Ball’s relationship with her
actor husband Desi Arnaz ( Javier Bar-
dem), with whom she made the show,
when he wasn’t cheating on her. Also,
she is pregnant. A lot to deal with —
then she is accused of being a commu-
nist in a McCarthyite witch-hunt with
echoes of today’s cancel culture.
Kidman is 54, 30 years into a career
that may have had fewer laughs than
she would have liked, but is signifi-
cantly more daring than many A-lis-
ters. Not unlike Ball, her fame overtook
her talent and she had to spend years
trying to remind people of her gifts.
Think back to the 1990s, married to
Tom Cruise and appearing with
him in glossy blockbusters such
as Days of Thunder. Even then
she was taking risks — such
as her role in Gus Van Sant’s
superb 1995 black comedy
To Die For — but it was not
until the next decade that
people started to see her as anYou expect comedy in Nicole Kidman
and Aaron Sorkin’s new film on America’s
sitcom queen Lucille Ball, but not fables
about communism and cancel culture
nicole
I’m WIlful
— Don’t
Put me
In a box
JOnathan
dean
interview
INTERVIEW
Being
the Ricardos
is available to
stream on
Amazon
from Dec 214 19 December 2021