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Nicole Kidman Gets Candid About Her Sexuality and Success as an “Older” Hollywood Actress
This year belongs to Nicole Kidman. Kick-starting 2017 with a clutch of awards nominations (including her fourth Oscar nod) for her role in Lion, she went on to earn plaudits for her powerful portrayal of a domestic abuse victim in Big Little Lies, the starry HBO adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s best-selling novel. With four prestige projects on the Cannes schedule (including a part in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled and a reunion with her Portrait of a Lady director, Jane Campion, for Top of The Lake’s second season, China Girl), she became the film festival’s undisputed Queen. And Nicole’s unstoppable momentum means that the prospect of her earning her first Emmy (for Big Little Lies) seems almost inevitable.
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What makes Nicole’s career resurgence all the more intriguing is that it has coincided with her 50th birthday. A successful woman marking her sixth decade by continuing and expanding upon that success, of course, shouldn’t be noteworthy, but Hollywood has a laughable track record when it comes to providing nuanced, multi-layered roles for “older” women, making her Big Little Lies character, for example, seem all the more anomalous.
Nicole as Celeste on Big Little Lies. (Photo Credit: Getty Images)
For Nicole, it’s important that women on-screen aren’t automatically “desexualized” on account of their age. In a new interview with Vogue, the actress pinpointed the part which sexuality played in the complicated dynamic of her Big Little Lies role, describing it as what drew her to the series. “Sex is a huge part of who I am. Things collide in terms of my intellect meeting my sexuality, and it’s a really complicated collision. It’s what I’m drawn to,” she explained, adding “If [my character] Celeste was just in the marriage trying to get out — without the sexual chemistry and desire to stay there — I wouldn’t know how to play her.”
Addressing how her attitude to success has changed with age, she went on to reveal, “Everything becomes more meaningful as you get older. It’s crazy. Big Little Lies means more. Lion’s success means more than Moulin Rouge!’s success. When you’re young you have that slightly laissez faire approach to everything.”
This post was written by Katie Rosseinsky. It originally appeared on our sister site, Grazia Daily.
