Nicole Kidman: She's got guts. She's been humanized. She takes risks. And she's the movie star the world has fallen in love with - Interview by Michael Cunningham

When I first met Nicole Kidman, she was on her way to be fitted for a rubber nose. I was visiting the London set of the film adaptation of my novel, The Hours, in which Kidman plays Virginia Woolf and for which she'd agreed to wear a sparrow-colored wig and a beaky, patrician, Woolf-ian false nose.


Kidman and I had been talking about Woolf before she was called to makeup. There are probably plenty of drop-dead-glamorous, million-megawatt movie stars who can speak knowledgeably and passionately about great iconoclastic English writers; I just haven't talked to any of them but Kidman. I don't know of many movie stars who would take on such a risky, difficult part, or who would allow their faces to be so altered in order to play it.


Kidman is, it seems, that rarest of creatures--a fully engaged, fearless actor who is also a movie star. She's set to play an illiterate janitor in the adaptation of Philip Roth's novel, The Human Stain, and a woman on the lam in Lars von Trier's Dogville. She's planning to appear on stage in London later this year in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, both to be directed by Sam Mendes. And this month Kidman can be seen in Birthday Girl, directed by Jez Butterworth.


When she returned from makeup that day in London, she looked not so much un-beautiful as differently beautiful. She was stern and haunted-looking; she was regal and fierce. Seeing her transformed like that, I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who once wrote of a woman that she wore "too much fever-colored rouge ... but she shone through that like a star." Kid man is the essence of the term "star," and if I say she'd regard that phrase with a certain skeptical bemusement, I mean it as high praise. She carries her humanness more visibly, more radiantly, than most of us are able to; she does not so much shine through her appurtenances like a wig and a fake nose as she does invest them with a shine of their own.


She's going to be a remarkable Virginia Woolf.

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM: Hey, Nicole.


NICOLE KIDMAN: Hi, Michael.


MC: How are you?


NK: I'm very well. I'm slightly jet-lagged, actually.


MC: You're in California?


NK: Yeah, but only for a week. Then I'm going to Sydney.


MC: You must be exhausted.


NK: Kind of. The only thing I've done this year [2001] is The Hours. I've traveled around doing other stuff, but I haven't worked creatively.


MC: You, Nicole Kidman, a movie star, have agreed to wear a wig and a big prosthetic nose to play Virginia Woolf. I, of course, am not a movie star. But we do have one thing in common: We're both people who've dared to portray Woolf. The genius and feminist icon.


NK: You did it very successfully. I'm still waiting with bated breath.


MC: I wouldn't want to call down the jinx or anything, but I've seen a couple of your scenes, and I don't think you have anything to worry about. You look great. And, well, you got it.


NK: I hope I got it. I'm still very nervous about it. But I'm always nervous.


MC: Me too. I find universal nervousness the best policy, overall.


NK: I just got back from London, where we were looping.


MC: What scene?


NK: The handwriting scene. We got it, and it looks good. I was writing her suicide note to Leonard. I'm such an obsessive perfectionist that I had to do my own handwriting. They said, "Oh, we'll use a hand double," and I said, "No, no, no."


MC: Wait a minute: Are you saying that you learned to reproduce Virginia Woolf's handwriting?


NK: Yes, but I'm left-handed, and she was right-handed, so that's what made it really hard.


MC: So you learned to produce Woolf's handwriting with your right hand, and you're left-handed?


NK: Mm-hmm. I'm very left-handed.


MC: Nicole Kidman, I bow down to you. [Kidman laughs] Not only did you wear the rubber nose, you learned her handwriting. People who've seen the rushes have been saying, "Loved it, and by the way, who was that English actress who played Virginia Woolf?"


NK: I sat in the makeup chair for two hours every morning, which I @#%$. I get antsy after about 20 minutes. But then I would go on set and completely forget about it. Never felt like I was wearing anything on my face. I was even able to do the drowning scene with it on.


MC: I'd like to talk about the drowning scene, which opens the movie. It was a tremendously difficult scene to write in the book, and I can imagine it must have been a hard scene to play.


NK: Mm-hmm. Walking into the river was really ...disturbing. I was in a state of mind that was, um, probably not completely stable, anyway. [both laugh] Not that I was suicidal, but just in terms of thinking, What would get you to the point where you'd choose to take your own life?


MC: Eudora Welty, the great Southern writer, once said that you can write about any situation you can imagine--you don't have to have worked in a logging camp to write your logging camp novel--but you can't write about an emotional state that you've never experienced.


NK: That's so true. And I don't think you can act one. You can try to fake it. Maybe the director can help you and edit around it, but I think people know it. They feel it, they sense it.


MC: They do. All right. There's something we have to get out of the way. When Interview asked me to talk to you, I was entirely happy to do it, but I told them, I'm not going to ask her anything about her personal life. I only want to talk to her about acting. And they said--


NK: No one's interested in anything else! [laughs]


MC: What they said is, we owe it to our readers. You don't need to focus on it, but it's an important part of Nicole's life. You've got to bring it up.


NK: Hmm. [laughs] OK. Shoot.


MC: What could I possibly ask you that you haven't talked about already?


NK: I have talked about it a lot. I mean, I've talked about it and I've not talked about it. I'm very glad that 2001 is nearly over, which is an awful thing to say about a year in your life, but I am glad. I think in some ways the world is glad. 2001 has not been a great year for the world.


MC: No.


NK: And even though there's been a lot written about [my life], most of it has been hearsay and rumor and speculation. In truth, it was an awful year. I think I was in a state of shock through most of it.


MC: Uh-huh.


NK: And I didn't pretend that everything was fine. I think in this strange way, this has been the year I grew up. It's when I went, OK--I'm not going to have everything work out the way it was meant to work out."


MC: There. Thank you! Readers of Interview, we have talked about Nicole's personal life!


NK: It's over. Done. And I'll never talk about it again publicly! [both laugh]


MC: Back to acting. As I said, I think you got Virginia Woolf. You totally did. I mean, you got her sense of gravity and depth and darkness, and at the same time you got her life, you got her liveliness.


NK: Yeah. She was playful; she was sort of mischievous.


MC: People tend to think of her as this tragic figure walking around in a cloak, with stones in her pockets. Which in a way, she was. But she was also the life of the party. On her good days.


NK: That comes across in your novel, so I wanted it to be there in the film. As I did all that research, I just fell in love with her.


MC: I, a Woolf nut, am glad to hear that.


NK: The film [due out later this year] actually came at a time in my life when Virginia was helpful to me. It's very strange how you choose your characters, or characters come into your life, at the right time. I just went, "OK, if [The Hours' director] Stephen Daldry feels I can play Virginia, then I'll believe him. Because it seems to have come into my life, and I'm meant to play her now."


MC: Yeah.


NK: And she gave me a lot. The same way Henry James and [director] Jane Campion, when I did The Portrait of a Lady [1996], gave me Isabel Archer at a time when I needed her.


MC: Part of what I love about your performance is the way in which it's not just an imitation of Virginia Woolf, which would have been, I don't know, a little dead.


NK: I think whenever you play somebody, it's not about imitating them. It's about finding their essence, trying to embody them in a certain way. David [Hare, The Hours' screenwriter], Stephen, and Scott [Rudin, the film's producer] and I all discussed that. I just said, "I can't be re-creating this woman. I have to find her essence."


MC: You know, I was talking to Julianne Moore about acting--


NK: What did she say?


MC: We were sort of talking about acting and writing in general, like, where does it come from, and Julianne said, "Honestly, I have no idea. I just walk in and do it."


NK: Right.


MC: I always wonder about that when I see a great performance. If there is a moment when you kind of . . . when something starts to click.


NK: You mean with Virginia specifically?


MC: Let's start with Virginia, and go on from there.


NK: I think for me, what I've learned, is that the way I work best is when my instinct is alive, and when I give over to that and don't try too hard. You have to relax, and you have to say, "OK, I will find it, or it will find me, and it may not happen on the first day of rehearsal, it may not happen until the last day of the rehearsal, but it will happen." And if you just allow that to exist, the character arrives. You become so absorbed in everything about the character and then suddenly it arrives. It's right in me, right now. I don't even need to think about it. On The Others, I just showed up in Spain. I spent a week trying to get out of that movie because I was so distraught [laughs] at the idea of playing a mother who did those things to her children. By the end of the week, when I realized I couldn't quit and they weren't going to fire me, I'd arrived at the emotional state I needed to play the character. [both laugh] I found her voice, this sort of light voice, and I put on the shoes, her little lace-up shoes. And there was the character.


MC: It works like that in fiction, too. At least, it does for me. Some detail, sometimes a minor one, opens an aperture, and you can step through it into the character.


NK: With Virginia, it was smoking those hand-rolled cigarettes. And there was a hankie I carried in my pocket. I don't know why, but this hankie in the pocket of the dress, this sort of housedress, did it. Everyone would look at my face and say, "You look so different." But it wasn't the makeup that did it for me; it was the smoking and that handkerchief. Then I changed the way I walked, and suddenly, Virginia was alive.


MC: I want you to be in the adaptation of my next novel, OK?


NK: Really?


MC: Can you play a large German woman who kills her parents?


NK: Absolutely! [both laugh]


MC: You know, I can't think of anybody, ever, who's gotten to be this big, glamorous movie star and done the kind of parts you're doing. Like Dogville, the Lars von Trier movie you're about to start shooting. And Chekhov and Shakespeare on the stage next year, with Sam Mendes.


NK: I'm not sure the big, glamorous movie star thing will exist for much longer! [both laugh] What happened to me this year... With Moulin Rouge I got to play this iconic female character, which, you know, is very rare. It was such a wonderful gift from Baz [Luhrmann, the film's director]--


MC: It's a great movie.


NK: I got to sing and dance and do all those things. And then with The Others, I got to play a woman who was the complete opposite. And then for both films to be commercially successful is very rare. I don't expect that ever again. I suppose that's why I'm going off to do a film with Lars, because in a strange way, I don't like the pressure and I don't like the idea of having to live up to some sort of expectation.


MC: I was wondering about that. I've found, even with a novelist's teeny-tiny recognition--


NK: Are you kidding me? You've had huge recognition. MC: Then again, as compared to, say, a movie star--


NK: Do you feel the pressure of it?


MC: Yes.


NK: It can be stifling.


MC: Yeah. It would be crazy to complain about all this good fortune, but it makes the writing ... well, if not more difficult, differently difficult. I wonder if that's true for you.


NK: Yes. It comes down to expectations. Success, I think, breeds fear. You suddenly say, "Oh, can I do it again?" And once you start to ask questions like that, you throw your creativity into the wrong sphere. So you just have to walk away from it. I've said, "OK, that was that year, and next year's going to be completely different."


MC: I love Lars von Trier.


NK: Everyone says, "Why are you doing that? Why are you going to Sweden in the middle of winter to work with Lars?" And I say, "Because he asked me to." [laughs]


MC: Well, the band of criminals and crackpots I hang around with are completely thrilled that you're doing it.


NK: I hope they don't expect it to be brilliant, though, because it's just going to be what it's going to be. [laughs] The thing I love about it is, it's an experiment. That's why I'm doing it.


MC: Again, for the benefit of readers, in Dogville, the new film by the rare and fabulous Lars von Trier, who last gave us Dancer in the Dark [2000], Nicole is playing a woman on the run who takes refuge in a small town. Very low budget, very edgy.


NK: I mean, it really is "Let's try something that may or may not work." But I believe in Lars' talent; I really believe he's a visionary. And he's brave. Brave and bold, two words I really like.


MC: And, after all, what's the fun of doing something you know you can do?


NK: Exactly. But I would like to do a comedy. Because you do have to have balance. My desire is always towards dramatic material. I'm drawn to the classics, I'm drawn to things that are deep and strong and profound. But then, I love to go and laugh.


MC: Of course.


NK: But whenever I do something funny, it's always a black comedy.


MC: Such as Birthday Girl? That being your forthcoming film, to open this month, directed by Jez Butterworth, in which you play a Russian mail-order bride.


NK: It's drifted. It started off as a black, black comedy, and now it's drifted into more of a sort of a romantic comedy. It's much lighter fare, but it's still quirky. Which is a word I actually don't like very much, because it's thrown around too easily.


MC: You learned Russian for the part, right?


NK: I'm not fluent.


MC: Still! You learned Russian! [both laugh] And you're about to shoot the film adaptation of the Philip Roth novel The Human Stain.


NK: Yeah, I am.


MC: One of the great thrills about Philip Roth, to me, is having watched him age, and write and write and write and, by writing and living for all those years, develop from a very good, interesting writer into quite possibly a great writer. Books like The Human Stain and American Pastoral could only have been written by a person of a certain age and stature. They're not a young man's books.


NK: No. There's a lot of wisdom in them. And I love the character I'm going to play. She's a janitor.


MC: You're doing amazing things. I mean, these are the parts I'd want to play if I was an actor. [laughs]


NK: Well, to be in a position where you're offered anything, you get down on your hands and knees and you kiss the ground. I've been in a position where, you know, you can't get a job, and you're so frustrated. You have all these creative juices flowing, and nowhere to focus them.


MC: Yeah.


NK: That happened to me when I was about 25, and we'd just adopted Bella [Kidman and Tom Cruise's daughter]. I'd had a couple of years of doing things that weren't fulfilling at all, and then nobody wanted to hire me, and I just thought, Right. Well, obviously that's the end of my dream. I'm not ever going to have the chance to play some of the great roles I wanted to play. And, strangely enough, once I gave up on that and went, "Oh well, so be it," suddenly To Die For [1995] came along.


MC: Something about a certain heedlessness--


NK: Yeah. When you say, "OK, it's not going to happen." I mean, it's a little like what can happen with people who adopt a child and suddenly get pregnant.


MC: Could we talk a little more about Virginia Woolf? I know Interview readers are clamoring for more information about her. [both laugh]


NK: So how long did it take for David [Hare] to get the script finished and for it to become a "go" movie?


MC: It happened very quickly. Scott Rudin is a formidable force of nature.


NK: Extraordinary.


MC: And David did a great job. He and I spent a couple of days together--


NK: Right. I was wondering how long you worked together.


MC: Very little. Partly because I didn't want it to be a completely faithful adaptation. I wanted David to mess around with it, take liberties, extend it, make it into a movie. So we had one long meeting, really, during which David said things like, "So, Michael. Clarissa--would she have large breasts?"


NK: He did not!


MC: He did. And I said, "No, I don't think so." And he said, "I thought not." And it went on like that. "What sort of sex did she and Sally, her lover, have?" It was great, because I realized he was trying to get a sense of these people's lives, and their bodies--


NK: Yeah, because you want to be able to envision them physically.


MC: And you want to know about their sex lives, to have that to build on. Because there's no sex in the book, sorry to say.


NK: You have to know, that's one of the first things you deal with when you're preparing a character because that's such a driving force beneath us all. When I did The Blue Room [in London and on Broadway in 1999] with David [Hare, who wrote the play], we went through each one of the couplings. We spent weeks. The whole play is about sex.


MC: Everything in the world is really about sex, except sex, which is really about power. So says Oscar Wilde.


NK: I suppose. I'm still a romantic, that's all I say.


MC: It's hard to write about sex. The English language thins out on you. [both laugh] There are no names. The female sex organ, for instance, has no acceptable name in English, nothing that isn't either clinical or pejorative.


NK: No. Well, there are some names for some things. There's "limerence," have you heard of it?


MC: No.


NK: My father was talking to me about it. It's from psychology, it's a term called limerence, which is that obsessive love, that state that's almost like a drug, when you're addicted to the other person. Don't know if you've ever been there.


MC: Once or twice. [both laugh)


NK: I'm sure it's not in the dictionary, but it's used in psychology.


MC: Limerence.


NK: Mm-hmm. Limerence. MC: That's the title of my next book.


NK: It's the title of my life!
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