Nicole Kidman Is a Punk Goddess in the Trailer for How to Talk to Girls at Parties
It’s the year of Nicole Kidman, and we’re all just measly spectators. Hot off the successes of HBO’s prestige mom drama Big Little Lies and her Academy Award-nominated supporting role in Lion, the transformative Kidman will be seen next on the big screen in How to Talk to Girls at Parties. And we’ve never quite seen her like this before, have we now?
In this John Cameron Mitchell-directed sci-fi drama based on Neil Gaiman’s short story, the narrative revolves around an alien (Elle Fanning) touring the galaxy for life experiences—an intergalactic study abroad, if you will—who ends up abandoning her group landing in the buzzy London suburb of Croydon back in the Eighties. Fanning’s alien ends up meeting and falling in love with a nice young punk (Alex Sharp) and becomes acquainted with Kidman’s punk goddess character in order to save herself from death. (We guess the aliens aren’t too pleased by Fanning’s unexpected disappearance.) It’s weird, it’s silly, it has a great soundtrack, and we’re into it.
The first teaser for How to Talk to Girls at Parties doesn’t give much away plotwise besides what we already know, but we are able to see Kidman yell fun phrases like “Rise up my children!” and wear excellent black eyeliner, so we’ll call this one a wash. It’s set to premiere at Cannes later this week, where it is one of four Kidman-related projects making a debut—the other three are Sofia Coppola’s southern gothic remake of The Beguiled, where she will be alongside Fanning once again; Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster follow-up The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which is about an arrival of a brilliant surgeon at the home of a dysfunctional family; and the second season of the hit New Zealand-based drama series Top of the Lake, which co-stars Elisabeth Moss. Set your predictions for next year’s Oscars.
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Nicole Kidman’s 13 Most Transformative On-Screen Roles, From Big Little Lies to Eyes Wide Shut
In 1990’s Days of Thunder, Kidman’s first role opposite soon-to-be husband Tom Cruise, she plays Dr. Claire Lewicki, a doctor charged with nursing Cruise’s NASCAR driver character to recovery in the aftermath of a horrific crash. Though a critical flop, Days of Thunder marked Kidman as one to watch — and it still has a cultish fan base nearly three decades later.
Kidman and Cruise’s second co-starring effort was Far and Away, the Ron Howard period piece about two Irish immigrants in turn-of-the-century America. Another film that was a popular success but a critical non-starter, Far and Away nevertheless found Kidman once again utterly transformed into the Irish émigré Shannon Christie.
Arguably Kidman’s most important role to date came with To Die For, the darkly funny crime comedy about an aspiring television anchor (Kidman, as Suzanne Stone). It earned the actress her first Golden Globe (she had previously been nominated, but lost to Mercedes Ruehl in The Fisher King) and, as a bonus, also features a 17-year-old Casey Affleck in his first role.
Kidman is luminous in the already overstuffed Batman Forever, which premiered later in 1995 with Val Kilmer as the titular Batman. She plays Batman’s love interest Dr. Chase Meridian, a psychologist — and though Batman Forever was far from Kidman’s most complex or lauded role, it still finds her again transformed, this time into the quintessential damsel in distress (albeit one with a PhD).
In the last of Kidman’s three roles opposite Tom Cruise, she plays his art curator wife Alice Harford in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It’s an eerie, complicated role, in which Alice deals with her own suspicions and dissatisfactions while Cruise, Dr. William Harford, undertakes a kind of sexual odyssey.
Kidman was nominated for Best Actress at the 2002 Academy Awards for her starring turn in Moulin Rouge! opposite Ewan McGregor. It turns out, Kidman is also a capable singer in addition to a transcendent actress.
It’s not just Kidman’s capable acting that sees her so transformed in 2003’s The Hours — the film that earned her her first and only Oscar thus far. It’s also her prosthetic nose that completes her evolution into the writer Virginia Woolf.
Nowhere is Kidman’s skill better on display than in the minimalist Lars Von Trier masterpiece Dogville, in which Kidman plays a woman on the run from the mob who hides out in the small town of Dogville, Colorado. With a set simply demarcated by lines on the floor, the film makes the most of its all-star cast, with Kidman at the center of it all.
Adapted from the 1997 novel of the same name, Cold Mountain earned an Oscar not for Kidman, but for supporting actress Renée Zellweger. Nevertheless, Kidman is in top form as a young society woman surviving Civil War-time hardships in the eponymous town of Cold Mountain.
With The Hours and Cold Mountain behind her, Kidman embarked on an early-’00s period of creative triumph. Two years later, she appeared in an entirely different kind of film, starring as an actual witch — Isabel Bigelow — playing an on-screen witch — Samantha Stephens — in 2005’s Bewitched opposite Will Ferrell. The film itself was widely deemed a failure of an adaptation of the original sitcom — but Kidman was singled out as the movie’s redeeming factor.
Kidman earned her third Oscar nomination for Rabbit Hole, the 2010 drama co-starring Aaron Eckhart and Dianne Wiest about a couple coping in the aftermath of their child’s death. Rabbit Hole also marked the feature debut of Miles Teller.
Last year, Kidman found herself back in the awards season conversation as Sue Brierley, the adoptive mother of Saroo Brierley, a young Indian man — played alternately by Dev Patel and Sunny Pawar — searching for his birth family. An extremely ’80s perm is just the start of Kidman’s on-screen transformation.
Kidman is one part of the all-star cast roped into HBO’s Big Little Lies, the limited series also starring Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley, Zoë Kravitz, and Laura Dern. Kidman plays Celeste, the stay-at-home mom and wife of Alexander Skarsgard, whose picture-perfect marriage and children bely a fraught narrative of domestic abuse.
