Sunday Rose Kidman Urban was ten weeks old when her mother heard the news that she’d finally raised the money to produce her first film, Rabbit Hole. But Nicole Kidman suddenly realized she now had to play a woman whose young son is killed in an accident, every mother’s nightmare.
“That’s when I went, ‘oh, no, this is not the right time,” Nicole recalls as she takes a sip of her cappuccino with extra froth and curls up on the sofa in her Four Seasons hotel suite in Beverly Hills. “But we’d been working on this for a long time and sometimes you don’t have a choice with these things.”
Based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Rabbit Hole tackles that heart-breaking saga with little sentimentality, but with a lot of humor, anger, blame and hope as Howie (Aaron Eckhart) and Becca (Kidman) take us on their journey of what keeps them fighting to stay together and survive in the face of such unimaginable tragedy. It’s Nicole as you’ve never seen her; raw, vulnerable and powerful; a tour de force for the 43-year-old Aussie Oscar winner that earned her a Golden Globe nomination and answered critics who prematurely wrote her off after the disappointment of ‘Australia’.
Looking casual but elegant, Nicole is wearing taupe-colored Stella McCartney pants, a cream silk shirt from Australian designer Easton Pearson under a camel-colored Prada cardigan and snakeskin Christian Louboutin pumps she’s already kicked off. She’s in great spirits despite acknowledging her work in this movie took her to places no one should ever have to go.
“It changes you, going to a place like this, in the same way that giving birth changes you and all the big things that happen in life,” Nicole says softly. “It put me in a place of humility and gratitude because of having walked through and lived in that psyche of devastation and loss and extraordinary anguish, but then I was able to step out of it in real life when I know those women never can.”
Nicole confides that she leaned heavily on her husband, Keith Urban, during the shoot. “Keith says I’m like a raw egg because I’m very sensitive,” she volunteers. “It’s a strange description but I suppose he’s used to that emotion and in a weird way he doesn’t mind it and is protective of it because he’s an artist so he understands what it’s like creatively.”
So when she awoke sobbing in the middle of the night, he was there too. “It’s happened in my life before but not on a film and it happened three or four times on this one, when I was crying so much I couldn’t breathe, so Keith would just hold me,” Nicole reveals.
It’s been a decade since Nicole’s fairytale ten-year marriage to Tom Cruise came to an abrupt ending. She’s not only endured since then, but also flourished; earning a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Moulin Rouge in 2001 and a Best Actress Oscar for The Hours in 2002. She’d always vowed in interviews that she’d retire at 40, but she grins sheepishly when reminded. “My mom said, ‘you don’t need to give up your career; you don’t want to be sixty and not have this thing you’ve always wanted to do since you were a little girl’ and my mother usually knows best,” Nicole says. “It’s also great to be a mother again at 43 because I can have the kind of lifestyle where I can work a bit and then take eight months off and most working mothers don’t get that.”
Now her two children with Cruise - Isabella, 18, and Connor, 15 – are all grown up and she’s enjoying life with a toddler again. Nicole can’t resist pulling out her phone and showing a video she just received of her gorgeous daughter, now two, whispering into the camera, ‘I love you mummy!’ Nicole beams and adds, “Sunday says, ‘I’m your little cub’ and isn’t that a nice description because I do feel like a lioness and I’d do anything to protect her.”
Nicole admits she was much more driven earlier in her career, when she made two or three films a year. “I was on that treadmill for a while but I’m in a completely different place now,” she nods. “I have my family and in some ways Keith has to push me out of the nest a bit, saying ‘off you go, you should do it, it’ll make you feel good’ but at the same time he says, ‘if you never work again, I’m cool with that too.’”
Rabbit Hole, along with other small films like Birth and Margot at the Wedding, have become part of a ‘Nicole Kidman brand’ that audiences come to expect from the actress - small, quirky, out-of-the-box and resembling art more than box-office. “I think I’ve finally given over to the fact I’ll never be mainstream,” Nicole says with an unapologetic shrug. “Since I was a child, I’ve never fit in and in the short stories I used to write for English class, the teacher’s jaw would drop and she’d say, ‘where did that come from in such a little girl’s head?’ I’ve always thought laterally,” she adds, “but I’m left-handed, so maybe that has something to do with it!”
Not that she has anything left to prove, but Nicole is forging ahead with another year of challenges. First she stars in the HBO cable network TV movie Hemmingway and Gellhorn, in which Clive Owens plays the iconic writer and she plays the only woman who ever asked him for a divorce. And she reveals she’s also in talks with producer Scott Rudin, who produced her play The Blue Room in 1998, to star in a new Broadway adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth at the end of the year. “I’m completely terrified; can you imagine opening night?” she says with horror. “But at the same time I always want to push myself and not sit in my comfort zone because my art tends to flourish the most that way.”
For now, nobody is accusing Nicole of resting on her laurels!
