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
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