(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 1 October 2025 15:45, UK
It’s hard to imagine a time when Nicole Kidman wasn’t famous.
From rising star to certified bombshell to her current role as something of an elder stateswoman in Hollywood, the striking star has always exuded star presence. As other female stars from her era have come and gone, she remains a constant fixture in the Hollywood scene.
Across her career, Kidman has taken on a range of interesting and varied characters. Some of them have been pretty tame – her role in Paddington boils down to wanting to catch and stuff the titular bear – but some have been pretty intense. She won an Oscar for portraying the author Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Her role as an aspiring celebrity in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For is a proper underseen gem, one of the many examples of the Australian taking on a role that a lesser actor would have fumbled.
To achieve so much success over such a long period of time requires more than just talent. You have to be disciplined in your work, to approach acting in a way that you know keeps you from burning out or dropping off. In an interview with Variety, Kidman went over some of her essential rules, explaining that, when she was in character, she wouldn’t break them for anyone.
“I don’t like to break where I am,” she said. “It’s almost a trance. If the director’s speaking off camera, I can hear it, but I wouldn’t come out of character – people are like, ‘She’s a little crazy.’ I don’t like the monitor. But someone like Baz Luhrmann loves you to look. If you make me, I will, but my preference is not to.”
The example of Baz Luhrmann is an interesting one. From Kidman’s account, it sounds like her fellow Aussie works in a way completely different from hers, yet the two were still able to get the best out of each other. For her performance as the glamorous nightclub singer Satine in Luhrmann’s explosion of colour and sound, Moulin Rouge!, the star was nominated for her first ever ‘Best Actress’ Oscar. She was still relatively early in her career, so maybe she didn’t feel confident enough to tell her director ‘no’, but the results speak for themselves.
It turns out that Kidman is still keeping this technique up years after her collaboration with Baz. When she was working on the Amazon Prime series Nine Perfect Strangers, she supposedly got so lost in her character that she refused to answer to her own name on set. Given that she was playing a Russian businesswoman who drugs her clients with a psychoactive drug, hopefully, this was as far as she went.
While you wouldn’t technically call what Kidman is doing ‘method acting’, it’s a slippery slope when actors get too involved in the characters they are playing. She seems to be staying just on the right side of things, able to pull back and get some perspective if she needs to. Fingers crossed she manages to maintain this balance going for, otherwise things may get a lot more awkward going forward.
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