The role that almost broke Nicole Kidman: “I don’t know if I’d choose to do it again”
No other mainstream movie star has had quite such a varied career as Nicole Kidman. Every actor wants to be called ‘brave’ at some point, but no one has earned that description as consistently as her. Over the years, she’s made musicals, experimental dramas, provocative romances, and existential horror movies. It doesn’t work every time. Occasionally, the results are so avant-garde or bold that they are nearly comedic. However, when it does work, she puts every other Hollywood star to shame.
Think, for example, of Gus Van Sant’s To Die For. Released in 1995, it starred Kidman as an ambitious twenty-something from a rural town who was willing to do absolutely anything to become a famous news anchor. It required her to be both endearing and sociopathic and to carry entire scenes on the strength of the minutest facial expressions. A moment in which she speaks directly to the camera in close-up is one of the greatest feats of acting in her career and proved early on that she was a force to be reckoned with.
She’s done some pretty playfully weird movies as well. She peed on Zac Efron in The Paperboy, for example, and went to delightfully awkward places with Harris Dickinson in Babygirl. It seems like she’s up for anything, no matter how unlikeable, grotesque, or physically taxing. It’s the sort of approach that Hollywood rarely rewards, as evidenced by the fact that her only Oscar was for playing Virginia Woolf in a relatively straightforward biopic.
For many actors, picking the most challenging, back-breaking role of their career would be fairly straightforward. But for Kidman, the list of possibilities is about as long as her filmography. When asked in a 2013 interview about which role affected her most, however, she didn’t opt for any of the ones that most of her peers would have trembled just to think about; she opted for a movie about grief.
“Rabbit Hole would probably be the thing that most got under my skin because I just had given birth to my daughter,” she said. “I’d been changed on such a biological level because of the birth. Then I went into that film, which is the thing that most terrified me.”
Directed by John Cameron Mitchell, Rabbit Hole follows a wealthy married couple whose lives are torn apart when their young son is hit and killed by a car. It’s the kind of raw, heartrending cinema that few people would elect to watch, but by all accounts, Kidman’s performance as a grief-stricken parent was one of her best. She was nominated for an Oscar for the role but lost to Natalie Portman.
Kidman recalled that the timing of the movie was both perfect and exquisitely painful. “I was still very worn, hormonal,” she concluded. “That film probably penetrated my psyche in places that I found very dangerous. I don’t know if I’d choose to do it again, but I’m so glad I made the film.” She has done many movies that centre on grief, but none fit quite so horribly with her personal life.
