The role Nicole Kidman didn’t feel good enough to play: “I really wanted that”
Throughout her career, Nicole Kidman has appeared in an incredibly diverse range of films. Whether she’s appearing in a rather subversive indie drama or a blockbuster, you can always guarantee that the actor will give a memorable performance, perhaps an award-winning one. Nominated for five Oscars, winning one for The Hours, she has asserted herself as one of Hollywood’s most recognisable stars.
Hailing from Australia (although she was actually born in Hawaii), Kidman began her career by starring in many Australian movies, like BMX Bandits and Dead Calm, before moving to Hollywood. Since the ‘90s, she has consistently taken on interesting roles, always pushing herself and refusing to prioritise the kinds of projects that will simply earn the studio lots of money. Kidman has appeared in controversial projects like Dogville and Birth, given a musical performance in Moulin Rouge!, and even played the villain in Paddington.
Evidently, she is interested in projects that are divisive, challenging, or simply good fun, resulting in credits ranging from Stanley Kubrick’s Eye Wide Shut to Happy Feet. However, a genre that Kidman has not typically gravitated towards is the romantic comedy. She’s appeared in many romantic dramas or thrillers, but the rom-com is an area she has only dipped her toes into a handful of times.
She starred in Nora Ephron’s Bewitched in 2005, which was critically panned, before appearing in another critical disaster, Adam Sandler’s Just Go With It, in 2011. Over a decade later, she led the Netflix rom-com A Family Affair, starring opposite Zac Efron as his love interest. Once again, Kidman’s attempt at a rom-com received less than impressive reviews.
Kidman certainly isn’t the first actor that comes to mind when you think of rom-coms, but things might’ve looked very different if she’d landed the iconic rom-com role she desperately wanted. In 1999, following roles in Batman Forever, To Die For, Practical Magic, and The Portrait of a Lady, Kidman lusted after the leading role in a certain Hugh Grant rom-com, but she claims she wasn’t “talented enough” to secure the part.
It’s a bizarre thing to hear Kidman say, considering that she went on to star in Eyes Wide Shut in 1999 instead. Yet, she really believed she wasn’t good enough to play Anna Scott in Notting Hill, a role that went to Julia Roberts. The movie, directed by Roger Mitchell, was a hit, and it remains one of the most beloved British romantic comedies of all time. It follows Grant’s character, a bookshop owner, as he falls for Anna, a film star who finds a sense of escape in his world of charming normality.
In an interview with Marie Claire, in which The Undoing co-stars Kidman and Grant discussed various topics, the actor revealed how she “really wanted the role that Julia Roberts played in Notting Hill,” before continuing, “But I wasn’t well known enough, and I wasn’t talented enough.”
Kidman certainly did have the talent for the role, but it’s a good thing that she ended up missing out on the part. Instead, she earned acclaim for her performance as Alice in Eyes Wide Shut alongside her then-husband Tom Cruise, leading to more complex roles that she would become known for in the early 2000s.
