Nicole Kidman covers the November issue of Vogue. The interview was conducted before the news about her marriage, but Vogue still had time (near the end of the piece) to reference it, with the writer mentioning that Nicole had given off a vibe that her personal life was in a transition. Even without that aside, Nicole seemingly did not mention Keith Urban whatsoever in the piece. She talked about losing her parents, the power of female friendships, how close she is to her sister Antonia and more. Those were the indicators: Nicole was already preparing herself for another divorce and starting over. Some highlights from Vogue:
Anthony Minghella told her that her acting is “skinless.” “I’ve always remembered it. I thought: I’m not sure that’s good, but I look back now that he’s gone”—Minghella died in 2008—“and I sort of understand what he meant. It’s okay, but sometimes you’ve got to put on armor, to protect, when you are skinless.”
She doesn’t like resting: “Taking a risk is what I’ve always done,” she said. Nor does she dwell on mistakes. “You get back up and you try again and you learn.” Her successes, acting or producing, allow her the scope to work on offbeat projects. “I still go back to shoestring indie filmmaking because it was where I was born, but then I can move into a big studio [movie] like Practical Magic, where you go, Okay! But that has an enormous amount of pressure and responsibility and how do you carry that load?”
Women’s film roles have changed so much: “It’s not the Madonna-whore anymore.”
Why she keeps taking these dark/sexual roles: “I don’t know. Isn’t that weird that I don’t know why?” In reality, she is an introvert—but, she said, “sex is an important part of our lives and is still, a lot of times, taboo, and it shouldn’t be.”
Her love of fashion: “Sometimes it’s armor. Sometimes it’s playful, sometimes it’s sexy. It just depends on my mood. Sometimes it’s androgynous, sometimes it’s kind of, screw you.” Kidman told me she sees fashion as “a parallel artistic life.”
On haters, judgment, online excoriation. “Literally walk away from it. Because it will fell you. It will destroy you.” She counsels her teenage daughters to follow Taylor Swift’s advice and shake it off. Sunday Rose began modeling last year, walking the runway for Miu Miu. “It’s very frightening for me,” Kidman admitted. “[But] I started working at 14, so I don’t really have a leg to stand on.”
She spent the summer in Europe with her family: “Going to Hyde Park and concerts, Glastonbury and Salisbury—so much summer fun—Evita, seeing theater, walking Hampstead Heath, swimming there. Went to Portugal, went to Greece, had my nieces and nephews around, lots of family: my sister, my best friend since I was four, and her three children. A very tight group.”
The mention of the divorce: A few weeks after we met, after this story had gone to press, news broke of Kidman’s separation from Urban (she would file for divorce in late September). During our conversations I had guessed as much, but I didn’t want to pry. When I asked about how she felt now, in her 50s, I had expected to hear a nice trite response about the sagacity of age. Instead Kidman was wry, rueful, unsure of herself. She said: “How many times do you have to be taught that you think you know where your life is going and then it isn’t going in that direction?”
Her description of her summer in Europe was a HUGE tell. She was not in a rush to get back to Nashville, she was not flying back to see her husband over the summer. Which is fine – even by the pro-Kidman descriptions, it sounded like Nicole and Keith agreed to some kind of trial separation in June, so they were both supposed to be taking some time and space to figure out what they wanted. He wanted to bang a 25-year-old. Nicole wanted to work on the marriage. Anyway, I’d love it if we got another post-divorce revenge-fashion tour from Nicole, like we got after she divorced Tom Cruise.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, cover courtesy of Vogue.
