Nicole Kidman names the biggest regret of her career: “That was the worst”
It’s been more than 40 years since Nicole Kidman made her screen debut as a fresh-faced teenager in 1983’s double whammy of festive drama Bush Christmas and kid-centric adventure BMX Bandits, so it would be a lot more surprising if she didn’t have any regrets at this point in her life.
The Australian native wasted little time making her mark on Hollywood after opting to try her luck Stateside in the early 1990s, and she even ended up marrying the first leading man she encountered in American cinema when she made her bow in Tom Cruise vehicle Days of Thunder.
It was clear from the beginning that Kidman was a hugely gifted actor, but it wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that she began gaining momentum as one of the very best in the business. She did win a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actress – Musical or Comedy’ for 1995’s satirical hit To Die For, but the dawn of the next century coincided with a sustained period of dramatic acclaim.
Kidman notched her first Academy Award nomination for Moulin Rouge, won the following year after being shortlisted again for The Hours, and went on to secure a further three nominations. Even if she’s been taking it relatively easy on the big screen in the last few years – with Being the Ricardos her only leading role in a movie since 2018 – she’s been tearing it up on television in the interim.
She’s won two Golden Globes and two Primetime Emmys for Big Little Lies and won further praise for her ongoing episodic excursions in Top of the Lake: China Girl, The Undoing, Nine Perfect Strangers, Special Ops: Lioness, and Expats. Kidman has conquered screens, both big and small, so she doesn’t have much to regret in the grand scheme of things.
That being said, her final credit of the 20th century is one that she views with bittersweetness. Kidman and then-spouse Cruise dedicated more than a year of their lives to Stanley Kubrick’s swansong Eyes Wide Shut, and they were thrilled with how the finished film turned out.
Sadly, Kidman never had the chance to tell the iconic auteur before he passed away. She’d finally seen the finished cut of the existentially eroticised psychological drama and was planning to phone Kubrick and let him know how much she loved it. She never got around to making that call and never spoke to him at all before he passed away.
“In my film life, that was the worst,” she told Filmmaker Magazine of not picking up the phone. “It’s also my biggest regret.” Kidman would have been under the impression that she could ring up Kubrick any time to pass on her praise for Eyes Wide Shut, but instead, the joyous experience of making it will permanently be counterbalanced by the complicated feelings brought on by the call she didn’t make.
