If it seems like a lifetime and at least a few seasons of Mid TV, as Times critic James Poniewozik has coined it, ago that we were all talking about Big Little Lies, it’s because it might as well be. The second season of the HBO series wrapped in 2019, and so much has happened since that it wouldn’t be surprising if we never got another installment of the stunning seaside properties and devastating personal lives of the show’s other name, the Real Housewives of Monterey.
But stars Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon have given a big update on the Emmy-winning show’s third season. In a Vanity Fair video, Witherspoon gently ribbed Kidman for having said that the series was returning last year (it didn’t). "Listen, this one already went somewhere and said too much," Witherspoon said, noting that costars Shailene Woodley, Zoë Kravitz, and Laura Dern all called her when they heard the false news. “I get the ring-ring, 'Hey, is that happening?' Nic! You got excited."
“I got excited,” Kidman, who executive produces the series, admitted. She went on to clarify, however, that season three is in fact underway.
“We're moving fast and furious,” Kidman told Witherspoon, “and Liane [Moriarty] is delivering the book. We're in good shape."
Moriarty’s novel by the same name inspired Big Little Lies’s hit first season, which starred Kidman as Celeste, a former lawyer and current housewife married to a terrifyingly abusive businessman played by Alexander Skarsgård. Witherspoon played Celeste’s plucky best friend, with Dern as a high-powered tech exec, Kravitz as Witherspoon’s ex-husband’s new wife, and Woodley as a struggling single mom. Meryl Streep memorably joined the cast for season two, which was based on an unpublished novella by Moriarty.
Back in 2019, Kidman noted that season two almost didn’t happen. “I had a lot of people say to me, ‘No, no, no, that’s it. You did only one. It was fantastic as one season,’” she said. “And a friend of mine, a male, said, ‘Those women deserve their stories to be told beyond what was just that first season.’”
It’s not clear exactly what Moriarty is working on at the moment, whether a full novel or a different writing project—only that it relates to the series. She and Kidman, both Australian, have become constant collaborators since that first season of the show, with Kidman also producing and starring in an adaptation of Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers for HBO, in addition to an adaptation of her novel The Last Anniversary, which will premiere on Australian streaming service Binge.
Stay tuned for updates on Big Little Lies season three.
