Keith Urban Says It Was ‘Hard’ Seeing Wife Nicole Kidman Play A Victim Of Abuse In ‘Big Little Lies’

It was beyond disturbing for fans to watch Nicole Kidman be abused on the hit show Big Little Lies, but it was about a million times worse for her husband Keith Urban! In a new interview, the country crooner said he was in agony seeing Nicole mistreated by her on-screen husband Alexander Skarsgard.

“It’s hard, because she really tells her story,” Keith admitted to The London Evening Standard. “I love how committed she is, though, in telling her stories. She had the bruises to prove it.”

Still, he’s very supportive of her craft, and even builds his schedule around setting up home base wherever she’s shooting. “We have a tutor that travels with us, so if Nic’s shooting a film for any long period of time, even if I’m touring, we can almost always relocate to wherever she is. And I’ll go to and from there. We just make the rhythm work so we can be together.”

The scene definitely wasn’t easy for Nicole to film, either. “I remember lying on the floor in the last episode, being in my underwear and having just been really thrown around,” Nicole told the Hollywood Reporter in June 2017. “I just lay on the floor. I couldn’t get up. I didn’t want to get up.”

While Nicole opted not to use a stunt double for the abuse scenes, it was still incredibly hard for her. “I just felt completely humiliated and devastated. And angry inside.” After one very tough day, Nicole actually “went home and threw a rock through a glass door” when she couldn’t get into her hotel room.

Still, it seems all of the suffering was worth it. In 2017, she actually won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or a Movie for the performance. And when her name was called, she gave Alexander a tender hug and kiss, proving that the wild experience only made them closer.

It’s easy to understand why: a scene that vulnerable and violent would take an awful lot of trust to film. Hopefully, she won’t have to do anything that horrifying again on set!