There’s little vanity. She told me she doesn’t mind being photographed bare-faced without makeup and likes her nose left red when she is crying in a scene. “I love the color of skin changing,” she told me. “I love flaws in the skin and I love real tears.” She is comfortable aging both up and down for a part. In 2018’s Destroyer, directed by Karyn Kusama—one of her indie films that was a critical success and a box office disappointment—she is almost unrecognizable playing a haggard, alcoholic cop. “And I’m about to do something where I’m going to look macabre,” she said, grinning. “I’m really excited.”
We were scheduled to meet again, in a bookshop—Kidman is a voracious reader (and currently in the middle of My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout)—but a close friend of hers died unexpectedly, and in shock and grief, she said she couldn’t do it. Later, talking by phone, she explained, “I was so vulnerable…. I’ve had a lot of sudden deaths in the course of my lifetime, which is awful.” Kidman comes from a close-knit family. Her father, a biochemist and psychologist, died in 2014; her mother died in September last year, on the same day Kidman was to be given the best-actress award for Babygirl at the Venice Film Festival. “Everyone was saying, You’ve still got to go and accept the award. And I just sat for a minute and I went, No, I can’t, I don’t, and I won’t.” Her ingrained discipline means it wasn’t easy. “My sense of duty and of being a good girl is so strong,” she told me, but, “at this age…I’m protecting myself when I need to. It’s my right—as Virginia Woolf used to say—it’s my right as a human being.”
Producing has also given Kidman increasing control. Scarpetta is shot in Nashville, “so I almost have a normal job when I’m there,” and she and Bullock wanted to film Practical Magic 2 in London in July and August so that they could have their children with them over the vacation period. The families had, she told me, a wonderful time. “Going to Hyde Park and concerts, Glastonbury and Salisbury—so much summer fun—Evita, seeing theater, walking Hampstead Heath, swimming there. Went to Portugal, went to Greece, had my nieces and nephews around, lots of family: my sister, my best friend since I was four, and her three children. A very tight group.”
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