Not only will musical “Nine” serve up some song and dance for audiences as it’s released in the last weeks of December, but there may be a message for Hollywood to be had about women’s acting roles.
In the forthcoming film, Nicole Kidman plays Claudia, the frequent leading lady in films by director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis). The two share a poignant moment, when the floundering director struggles to describe Claudia’s ambiguous role as a series of muses in a great Italian man’s life. It’s a premise that mirror’s Guido’s own creative situation and dilemm.
“So I am the women behind the great man?” Kidman’s Claudia asks. “I’d rather be the man.”
“The way [Guido’s] describing it — to be specific in that scene — obviously that [man’s] role sounds far more riveting than all of the other things things he’s presenting to me. In Hollywood,” Kidman says at a press event in New York, ”roles are better for men.”
Then, too, Kidman expanded on her impending performance in 2010’s “The Danish Girl” as Einar Wegener, a man who undergoes a sex change, acting opposite of Gwyneth Paltrow. “I’m about to play a man, so strangely enough, that doesn’t ring true for me,” she laughs.
The 42-year-old actress mentioned there are exceptions to the rules in Hollywood, or even a rewriting of the rules: she cited Angelina Jolie’s role in the 2008 action film “Wanted,” which was a part originally penned for a man. “I wish they’d do that more often,” Kidman says.
