Nicole Kidman’s unsolicited audition for the biggest movie of 1990: “I don’t know how she got the script”
1990 was the year that Nicole Kidman placed herself firmly on Hollywood’s radar, but it could have been an even bigger year if her unsolicited audition for its biggest movie had paid off.
After gaining attention in her native Australia as one of the local industry’s most promising young talents, Kidman made the jump to America and debuted in style, playing the female lead in Tony Scott’s high-octane racing drama Days of Thunder opposite then-beau Tom Cruise, with her Stateside debut a rousing success.
The film was released a week after her 23rd birthday, and while the work kept coming in her new surroundings, it wasn’t until 1995 that the one-two punch of a sizeable blockbuster gig in Batman Forever and a standout Golden Globe-winning performance in To Die For cemented her as a star.
Kidman could have achieved all of that and more half a decade previously, though, after submitting an audition tape for Jerry Zucker’s Ghost. The supernatural drama cleared half a billion dollars at the box office to become the top-earning title of 1990, and the third highest-grossing movie of all time.
The cultural phenomenon burned itself into the collective consciousness, won two Oscars, made it onto the ‘Best Picture’ shortlist, and turned Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze into the defining cinematic sex symbols of the year. And to think, it could have been Kidman, even if nobody seems sure how she managed to audition for it in the first place.
“When we were getting ready to do Ghost, Nicole did an audition video, totally unrequested, and sent it to us from Australia,” screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin recalled. “I don’t know how she got the script, but the video was quite an elaborate production: fully cast, blocked, acted, with little sets and lights and everything. It showed a lot of enterprise; I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Ghost had a nightmarish time in trying to cast its Sam Wheat, with Bruce Willis, Michael J Fox, Harrison Ford, and almost every other bankable leading man in town turning down the part, and even when Swayze went into audition, he had to fight hard to convince the producers that he was the right guy for the job.
On the other hand, Moore was always Zucker and Rubin’s preferred candidate for Molly Jensen, regardless of how impressive Kidman’s DIY audition was. Somehow, much to the bemusement of the people involved in the making of the film, she’d discovered from Australia that the opportunity was there to throw her hat into the ring, so she can’t be faulted for her initiative.
Of course, it was an unsuccessful endeavour, but Kidman surely wouldn’t have minded too much, since she’d won plenty of notice among the right people in the right places by the end of 1990 anyway.
