Equity Mag Sep_17 Book Folder

COVER STORY
I’ve had such a weird, windy,
twisty road with it, So, this year’s
been where people have kind of decided
to discover things and support me
– but other times they haven’t,
so I’ve lived through it all
the extraordinary run of work she’s had, with roles in Sofia
Coppola’s latest, The Beguiled, the upcoming second season
of BBC2’s Top of the Lake and, before that, HBO’s Big Little
Lies, playing a photo-perfect Monterey housewife trapped
in a cycle of spousal abuse. The last of these performances
drew gasps, an Emmy nomination and a rash of career
reassessments with headlines like “How many times does
Nicole Kidman have to prove herself?” Variety ran a Nicole
Kidman World Cup on Twitter to determine her best
performance; those paying tribute ranged from the actress
Zoe Kazan to Moonlight’s director, Barry Jenkins. “She's
become cool again without ever seeking it out,” says the
director John Cameron Mitchell, who made 2010’s Rabbit
Hole with her. “She has this blueblood aura, this sort of regal
poise, but in her film choices she’s incredibly punk.”
The woman who shows up at the Four Seasons couldn’t
be further from the cool ice queen of media myth, standing
guard over the secrets of her previous marriage to Tom
Cruise like a sphinx. Candid, deep-feeling to the point of
tears when the subject of family comes up, Kidman, who
turned 50 in June, is much warmer and more offbeat than
you’d think – a kooky empathy attuned to an almost
spooky degree to the emotional temperature of whomever
she’s with, with an unruly laugh that seems to absorb all
the ups and downs of a 30-year Hollywood career. “I’ve
had such a weird, windy, twisty road with it,” she says. “So,
this year’s been where people have kind of decided to
discover things and support me – but other times they
haven’t, so I’ve lived through it all.” Out comes that big,
jaunty Aussie cackle. The second season of Top of the Lake
took Kidman back to suburban Sydney, where she grew up
and where, in the series, Elisabeth Moss’s detective is on
the trail of a prostitution ring. Kidman plays a feminist
matriarch with a glorious cascade of grey hair, whose
dinner table abounds with talk of Germaine Greer and
revolutionary politics, but whose relationship with her
adopted daughter, played by Campion’s actual daughter,
Alice Englert, has degenerated into a haggard war of
attrition. Kidman’s performance – ferocious, knotted, full
of thwarted love – joins a growing throng of mothers she
has played in recent years, from her saintly adoptive
mother in Lion, to her Medea-like, murderously fierce
mother in Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others.
“The strongest force I can find within me, right now, is
the maternal force,” she says. “Romantically, I’m obviously
incredibly awake and alive. I have a really, really strong,
26
EQUITY