Nicole Kidman Says “A Lot of People” Told Her Not to Do a Second Season of Big Little Lies

Nicole Kidman is giving the finger to her haters, metaphorically at least. The actress recently opened up about the second season of Big Little Lies, which returns June 9 on HBO. The continuation of the once-limited series almost didn’t happen, though, as Kidman revealed while talking about the many people who discouraged her from suiting up once again as Celeste.

While in conversation at the Wing alongside her castmates Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, and Meryl Streep, Kidman said of ending the first season, “We don’t have to just be shut down and told, ‘No, that was good and you did well and off you go.’” When the cast was invited back to do a follow-up season, Kidman actually debated it for a moment because of how many people told her it was a bad idea. “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, as Buzzfeed points out. “And a friend of mine, a male, said, ‘Those women deserve their stories to be told beyond what was just that first season.’”

“The situation originally, it was that one go-around, and I remember Reese and I both going, ‘Well, that’s that. Gosh, it was great,’ and then by popular demand we had to address whether we wanted to do it again,” Kidman continued, adding, “I was so touched by that, and I went, ‘Yeah, that’s what we’ve actually got to fight for now.’”

As for Streep, who we wouldn’t be blessed with in season two had Kidman listened to those naysayers, the actress talked about what she loves most about Big Little Lies: how real and fully dimensional the characters are. “This is an ensemble of very complicated, very flawed, hysterically funny, but tragic women,” Streep said. “For a long time in movies and television, women would be singular in a story and they would represent something—a love interest, the complications of individual women—and I think part of the appetite of the second season of this had to do with the fact that we were seeing people who were not emblematic.”