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The
exquite Oscar-winning actress talks up her two latest
outings—The Golden Compass and Margot at the Wedding—and
the utopian world that she is determined to create for
herself and her family.
NEW YORK—Nicole
Kidman volunteers that she was in a funk as far as
acting was concerned, but insists it had nothing to do
with approaching a certain age. She derides such
milestones as artificial foolishness and, after all, “We
could all be dead tomorrow. What does 40 mean?”
So what
was it, then, that had her down on her craft before her
new Margot at the Wedding?
A while
back, she suggested she simply was going through a phase
where she didn’t have anything to say, “anything inside
me,” and thus lacked the “primal urge” to act. More
recently, she mentioned “mistakes” she’d made in picking
roles, presumably since her Oscar-winning turn as
Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Or maybe she was
just happy, she said, floating the notion that “my whole
life was so full that my interest in performing had
really lessened.”
Whatever
we believe, her point to us as moviegoers, and not
snoops, is that she rediscovered her love of acting in
writer-director Noah Baumbach’s dark comedy, with a
touch of Bergman, about wedding plans that go awry with
the arrival of Kidman as the bride’s older sister, a
writer who can’t help speaking her mind, whether it’s
about the groom-to-be (he’s a loser), her quiet young
niece (clearly autistic) or the bride herself (why
doesn’t she look you in the eye?).
For
Kidman, it was another character who throws bombs,
albeit verbally, while putting on an innocent face and
thus was reminiscent of her suburban wife willing to
kill to achieve fame in To Die For, the 1995
satire that signaled that this pale, beanpole Australian
might be more than the sexy chick of her earliest roles
or the celebrity spouse of her first marriage.
Since
then, she has made it clear that she’s not one of those
starlets who slum in an art film or two in a bid to
prove their bona fides. The poseurs are quickly exposed,
after all, by the most basic of acting chores, such as
having to adopt an accent.
So
consider how Kidman takes on one voice in Margot—of a
New York literati—then another in the epic she’s filming
in her home country, Baz Luhrmann’s WW II-era Australia,
in which she plays an upper-crust Englishwoman who
inherits a cattle ranch. After that? She becomes a
German palm reader in Stephen Daldry’s The Reader.
She’s also in Chris Weitz’s upcoming fantsy film The
Golden Compass. “But as there’s an obvious risk
every time you adopt an unnatural voice—humiliation—so
is there a risk every time you do an indie with, say, a
Lars von Trier, in whose Dogville Kidman was
raped and chained to a wheel.
Of
course, there’s a risk, too, in climbing a gnarly tree,
as Kidman does in Margot, pulling herself up branch by
branch, to heights that high-priced stars are not
supposed to go.
“I’ve
worked since I was 17 and you go through ebbs and
flows,” Kidman said while in New York in advance of the
film’s November release. “You know, the balance between
your actual life and your working life... Margot came at
a time, I think, when I was just ready to be awakened as
an actress.”
But when
producer Scott Rudin sent her Baumbach’s script, she
didn’t think she was right to portray the spoilsport
older sister, a Manhattan author. Then she saw his
The Squid and the Whale, also about a dysfunctional
family, “and I said, ‘All right, I’ll just kind of jump
in.’”
They
filmed it at a seaside home in the
Hamptons
with the lonely tree Kidman climbs. It’s under it that
younger sis Pauline—played by Baumbach’s real-life wife,
Jennifer Jason Leigh—is supposed to marry Jack Black,
who plays a would-be artist who spends his days writing
letters to newspapers. The first time we see Kidman’s
Margot is on the bus, with her son, when she’s not yet
met the intended groom, but is already dubious, because,
as she says, “Why would you marry someone you’ve only
known a year?”
Kidman
said the hardest times were when Margot turns on her
son, criticizing how he walks, even—a type of mothering
she would not dream of with her own two children,
adopted with first husband Tom Cruise. Baumbach had to
remind her to stay in character when she corners the boy
by a staircase. “He’s like, ‘Mustn’t cry. You mustn’t
touch him.’...I said, ‘Yes, but you can’t make this
woman one dimensional. Promise me that you’ll feel her
pain, that you’ll feel her heart.’”
That’s
her job as an actor—to defend her character, to make the
woman’s case, in part by suggesting a “Why?” behind her
behavior. But Kidman does not like to go too far into
this aspect of the craft. When she goes to the movies,
she says, she doesn’t want to know what the actors were
thinking at any moment or what they drew on in their own
lives, just as she doesn’t want to know how special
effects were achieved. She’d rather maintain “the
mystery of performances.”
The
spotlight on Kidman’s family life inevitably has focused
on first husband Cruise and second husband Keith Urban,
and after that her younger sister, Antonia, a TV
personality in Australia, with whom she speaks daily.
“We always say if we outlive our husbands we’d live
together,” Kidman said, “like those old women living in
a house. ‘Who are those crazy sisters?’”
But when
you spend so much time on movie sets, you build families
there, too, and 76-year-old costume designer Ann Roth is
part of Kidman’s after working with her on The Hours,
Cold
Mountain and Margot. So is dialogue coach Elizabeth
Himelstein, who has helped her on a slew of films.
For
Margot, they decided the character “didn’t quite fit
in to the whole New York literary society,” Himelstein
said, and that led them to think of Susan Sontag, who
originally was from Tucson, Arizona, but developed the
“New York upper-class sound,” only as an outsider.
Kidman practiced for weeks to lower the register of her
voice, make it come more from the chest.
Kidman
is godmother to Himelstein’s four-year-old daughter and
“takes the role seriously,” Himelstein said, describing
how the five-foot-11-inch actress gets down on the floor
to play with the girl. And when her goddaughter was in a
preschool play, guess who was in the bleachers with the
proud mommies and daddies?
One way
Kidman found to become allied with her character in
Margot was to see her as making trouble for her
sister out of love. “I’ve got to save her from this man.
This isn’t good enough for her,” Kidman said. “I mean,
how many of us have had people in our lives say that?”
Kidman
knows of such things better than most, given the blood
sport of speculation about her first marriage, and to a
lesser degree her second, to Urban, the
Australian-raised country singer, who, four months after
they wed, checked into the Betty Ford Center for rehab.
When he got out, he thanked his wife for staying “strong
and loving”—for, in the country tradition, standing by
her man.
It’s in
that context that she tells us that she’s finally found
the balance between love and work.
She used
to speak of a dream of escaping to an island where her
hair would flow as her kids trailed behind, kids
everywhere. “Yes, yes...the island was probably a
metaphor,” she said, “for how I was feeling is that I
just wanted to be alone and isolated.”
Her new
idea of utopia is a farm. She and Urban bought land in
Tennessee, plan to build a house and have “a gentle
existence that’s quite private.” She speaks like that’s
her reality already, though she’s been in Australia for
months, reunited with Moulin Rouge director
Luhrmann, to play the lady with the English accent.
“I ride
a lot in this film. So I would like to have a couple of
horses,” Kidman said of her farm. And she’d like one
thing more in that Eden, a “little thing” the snoopers
would never guess. “I’d like to have,” she said, “a
goat.” |
