The crucial acting advice Stanley Kubrick gave Nicole Kidman: “It was just wonderful”
Just like any other profession, actors tend to get better the longer they do it, picking up new tricks, tips, and techniques along the way. It was obvious from the start that Nicole Kidman was destined for the top, but it wasn’t until she encountered an all-time great that she adopted a different approach to her craft.
She was doing just fine before working with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut, though, scoring the first major trophy of her Hollywood career the very same year principal photography began when she won a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actress – Comedy or Musical’ in Gus Van Sant’s acerbic To Die For.
In what may or may not be a coincidence, after being given career-altering advice by the enigmatic virtuoso, Kidman took her career to the next level. Two years after Eyes Wide Shut, she notched her first Academy Award nomination for Moulin Rouge, and the year after that, she went one better and took home the ‘Best Actress’ prize for The Hours.
There was a clear evolution in Kidman as a performer at the turn of the 21st century, and it’s not out of the question to suggest that Kubrick was instrumental. She’s spoken glowingly of her experience on Eyes Wide Shut numerous times in the years since, and something as innocuous as perusing a screenplay for a potential role took on an entirely different meaning after she’s been instilled with the iconic auteur’s words of wisdom.
“I was taught really early on to always read the whole script from beginning to end, and the first time you do it, to write everything down because you’ll never have that first response, you’ll never have that first reading ever again,” she explained to Backstage. “You’ll have different ways of approaching it when you reread it. But the first time, you get an immediate response. And so quickly write your feelings down so that you can capture that.”
Instead of reading the script, putting it down, and then sitting in a period of quiet reflection, Kubrick encouraged Kidman to make the most of that first-time feeling. From that point on, she’d capture the experience of living the character’s journey for the first time and then use that to aid and enhance her performance instead of gradually finding a way in through repetition and rehearsal.
“It was just wonderful,” she said of Kubrick’s life-changing urging. “I’ve never stopped doing it. That always has a wealth of information in it.” Kidman had been acting for almost two decades before she even met Kubrick, but like so many others, to gain first-hand experience with the maestro and absorb as much knowledge and information as humanly possible, she was never the same again afterwards.
