“I really can’t act”: the role Nicole Kidman was convinced she’d be fired from
There are few stars in modern Hollywood as prolific as Nicole Kidman, whose schedule seems to be perpetually full. It’s one of the industry’s greatest mysteries – how does she find the time to appear in so many movies and TV shows, delivering impressive performances each time?
It’s not like Kidman sacrifices quality for quantity, either – well, most of the time. She has plenty of hits under her belt, and she can name some of the finest and most innovative filmmakers as collaborators, like Stanley Kubrick, Jane Campion, and Jonathan Glazer.
She’s Hollywood royalty, and her success can be found in just how up for anything she really is – whether she’s trying to kidnap Paddington bear and turn him into taxidermy, or experimenting with BDSM. Kidman has range.
With an Oscar to her name and a diary that has long been bursting at the seams with endless days of shooting and promoting projects, you would think that Kidman has always been secure in her abilities, but even after she’d won an Oscar and worked with Kubrick, she was still convinced she was a terrible actor. It gives you hope when someone as talented and successful as Kidman admits to experiencing self-doubt and imposter syndrome, it appears that for some people, those feelings never fully go away, and you have to learn how to push past them.
In a 2003 interview with The Independent, Kidman was asked if she thought she was in her prime. Considering she’d already been in many big Hollywood movies and given impressive turns in everything from Practical Magic and To Die For to Eyes Wide Shut and Dogville, you’d think she’d say yes. But Kidman is more humble than that. “Absolutely not. I’ve never felt good about my work, not when I see it on screen, I just don’t get it,” she said.
It seems like it’s a common problem for actors to doubt themselves, even when the whole world seems to be saying otherwise. “I found out recently that Dame Judi Dench feels the same about her work – it was a relief to discover that someone I admire has that problem too,” Kidman revealed. Clearly, the best stars are the ones who aren’t deluded enough to think they’re perfect – that always seeps through and ruins a performance, anyway.
Still, Kidman finds it difficult to watch videos of her acting, struggling to reckon with the image of herself on screen. “The American Cinematheque gave me an award recently, and the ceremony consisted of them showing loads of clips of my work while all these great directors were sitting there. I thought, ‘Oh, this is appalling, I really can’t act, can I?’ I was so embarrassed by the clips.”
Her self-doubt has gotten so bad sometimes that she has become convinced that she’s going to be fired – the actor has never been fired from an acting job, yet she often struggles to find a sense of security even after she’s landed a part, admitting, “I’m doing a film with Sydney Pollack in March, and I was sure he was going to fire me. I leaned over and said, ‘Sydney, I totally understand if you don’t want me for the movie any more’… It feels like I spend my whole time battling just to remain in the industry.”
Of course, she wasn’t fired – Kidman played the lead in Pollack’s The Interpreter, having starred with him a few years earlier in Eyes Wide Shut. It can be hard to accept your worth sometimes, and it seems like it’s a pretty universal experience to convince yourself that you’re destined for failure, even when that’s clearly not the case.
