The character Nicole Kidman said she was destined to play: “I believed her”
Nicole Kidman is one of the most fearless performers of all time, imbuing a sense of risk and sensitivity into each role as she channels everything into creating the most authentic and lived-in characters. The actor is a trailblazing figure within independent film, never shying away from a challenging story and embracing it as an opportunity, embodying the lives and experiences within these fictional worlds. Through her breath-taking performances in Birth, Dogville and Big Little Lies, Kidman has remained one of the most adaptable and in-demand actors of all time, bringing a unique passion and commitment to every single project. This is something that can be seen from her earliest projects, with the actor describing one character she believes she was destined to play.
Despite the age-old Hollywood rhetoric that women could only play certain types of roles, Kidman was one of the few first women to break free from this limiting mould and prove the demand for unruly and unconventional women, playing everyone from Virginia Wolf, Gretchen Carlson and a successful CEO who has an affair with her much-younger assistant. But perhaps her fascination with these types of characters came from her early experiences in the industry and one role that changed everything.
Fate can have a hand in the most unsuspecting of things, and for Nicole Kidman, her work with Gus Van Sant perhaps became the most fateful performance of her entire career, with the film sparking decades of similarly complicated roles that she became renowned for.
To Die For, directed in 1995, follows an aspiring news reporter who begins committing crimes in order to create stories to report on. Kidman plays the dangerously driven and ambitious journalist who will retort to any means to achieve success, portraying someone who is both mesmerising charismatic and cold, using her sexuality to manipulate teenagers into joining her murderous and cult-like scheme.
When describing her role in the film, Van Sant said, “I thought she was incredibly dedicated to making a fantastic performance through study of the script and the part, in a way I had never seen before. There were notebooks, and scene exercises, and voice exercises — it was very thorough. Nicole was so versed in the scenes that she was like having a second director there, who helped with the kids that we had playing her students, and it was a very welcomed help that she gave with them.”
Kidman is incredibly thorough and committed when it comes to her craft, leaving no stone unturned as she fleshed out every single detail of a character to make them as convincing as possible. When describing why he cast Kidman, Van Sant said, “Nicole called and said she was destined to play the part, so I believed her.”
Destiny sometimes has a larger hand in our success than we might initially give credit to, but as well as being perfect for the role, Kidman created her own fate by doing everything in her power to convince Van Sant that was right for the part, with the role later earning her widespread acclaim and shortly leading to one of her most infamous roles in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
