The movie Nicole Kidman’s agent tried to stop her from making: “You cannot do this”
In the early 2000s, Nicole Kidman’s career and personal life underwent a huge amount of change and upheaval. Professionally, she reached her highest highs yet when she was nominated for a ‘Best Actress’ Academy Award for 2001’s Moulin Rouge! The following year, she went one better by winning the award for her performance as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. In the same period, though, she finalised her much-publicised divorce from Tom Cruise, and then chose to follow up her Oscar win with a movie her agent baulked at. Despite his protestations, though, Kidman forged ahead with the controversial picture.
When Kidman found herself in Trollhättan, Sweden, on a soundstage sporting some of the most minimal set design ever put on-screen, she could have been forgiven for wondering if she’d made a mistake. She had signed up to star in maverick Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Dogville, a story of a young woman on the run from her gangster father who holes up in a rural Colorado town. She is subsequently subjected to several degradations and sexual assaults from the townsfolk, which push her to breaking point.
While the film’s subject matter was risky in and of itself, its style was arguably an even bigger gamble by Von Trier. He wanted Dogville to look more like a play shot in a black box theatre than a traditional movie, so the entire three-hour runtime takes place on a minimalist black stage with white chalk outlines standing in for background items and locations. For example, the outline of gooseberry bushes simply had “Gooseberry Bushes” written on it. This kind of artistic experiment has always been extremely rare in film – and Kidman’s agent thought their client shouldn’t be anywhere near it.
“I just remember my agent at the time saw what was going to be the film, the sets, and he was like, ‘No, you cannot do this,'” Kidman admitted to The Guardian in 2025. “And I was like, ‘I’m absolutely doing it.'”
Ultimately, Kidman’s agent was at least right to be concerned, because Dogville was polarising for audiences and critics alike. Some people, such as Quentin Tarantino, found it a challenging masterpiece that pushed cinema to its experimental limits. In contrast, others found it to be pretentious, tedious, and more than a little problematic. Audiences’ curiosity ensured that it made $16million at the box office on a $10million budget, though, which meant Von Trier could make a sequel two years later called Manderlay.
Interestingly, Kidman chose not to return for Manderlay, with scheduling conflicts being reported as the official reason. However, in later years, she admitted to trying to quit Dogville several times because Von Trier would drink on-set and often had a habit of making inappropriate comments. It was also rumoured that he stripped naked in front of her, although that was never confirmed.
Despite this, though, Kidman claimed she still counted the director as a friend, as strange as that sounds. “I admire his honesty and I see him as an artist,” she told ABC Radio National, “and I say, my gosh, it’s such a hard world now to have a unique voice, and he certainly has that.” She also still has fond memories of Dogville, explaining, “It was crazy but exquisite, just because it was so strange, and Brechtian. I was just grateful that somehow he was given the money to make that film, right? Probably wouldn’t be given it today.”
