Nicole Kidman’s Perpetual Trick

A quick confession: I’ve never seen the original Stepford Wives because I’m so shamefully partial to the 2004 remake, in which Nicole Kidman plays both a ferocious redheaded television executive and her blissed-out, high-femme, blond doppelgänger. At first, the beats of the story are the same: After a workplace meltdown, Joanna (Kidman) and her husband, Walter (Matthew Broderick), seek refuge in a pastel-colored Connecticut town where—spoiler—the whiny, emasculated men have roboticized their careerist wives, whom they operate with remote controls that look like shiny gold vibrators. Soon enough, they recruit Walter to join them, and he agrees to microchip his own. The twist in the remake is that he can’t go through with it. Joanna, it turns out, is a shrewd tactician in the uncanny, lights-out body of a bombshell, hiding in plain sight.

Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. For the past decade or so, since her Emmy-winning turn in HBO’s Big Little Lies, Kidman has careened dizzyingly between artist and star. Last week, right as she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, for her audacious performance in the erotic thriller Babygirl, she headlined Netflix’s new series The Perfect Couple, offering a performance so stilted and stylized for the first five episodes, it felt a little like robot Nicole was back. Within the realm of film, Kidman seeks out auteurs to work with: Gus Van Sant, Stanley Kubrick, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Lars von Trier, Yorgos Lanthimos. On television, often in shows that she herself produces, she presides over what the writer David Mack last week named Nicole Kidman’s Beach-Reads Cinematic Universe: glossy, opulent series about inscrutable, secret-keeping white women that skirt the line between prestige and pap. (The opening credits to The Perfect Couple feature the entire cast dancing a choreographed sequence on the beach to Meghan Trainor’s “Criminals.”)

[Read: The secret of Big Little Lies]

In her newest TV role, Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, a popular novelist of murder mysteries and the absurdly mannered matriarch of a privileged Nantucket family. The show is adapted from the novel of the same name by Elin Hilderbrand, which describes Greer at one point as conveying “class, elegance, regality even.” In character, Kidman indeed appears like a constructed vision of femininity: teased yellow hair, a rigidly slender frame, a controlled voice, a gaze that’s equivocal and detached. She’s more than a little alien, unnaturally poised and unreachable. Susanne Bier, the Danish filmmaker who directed The Perfect Couple, is known for her tight close-ups, and with some cast members, she zooms all the way in to show us the minutiae of their eyebrows, their nose, their pores. But with Kidman, she often films the actor behind glass, as if to respect her distance—her unwillingness to let audiences get close. I could sense the intention behind it, but that didn’t mean it worked; there are moments when Greer reminded me of, say, Kristen Wiig doing Katharine Hepburn on Saturday Night Live. (“We love you,” she purrs to a videographer, about her son and his fiancée. “We LOVE you.”)

In the final episode, though, Kidman pulls off one of her signature flips, revealing some of what she’s been playing at all along. The episode made me wonder whether I’d been doing her an injustice by presuming that she conceives of her roles as binary: the “serious” jobs with visionary directors versus the women-oriented airport-novel adaptations. There’s a unifying thread across her work that possibly deserves more attention. Kidman has portrayed, across several decades of working in Hollywood, nearly every sticky trope in the industry’s playbook. She’s been the damsel in distress (Dead Calm, Far and Away), the femme fatale (Moulin Rouge, The Human Stain), the unknowable ingenue (Birthday Girl, Dogville), the witch (Practical Magic, Bewitched). In both the recent Netflix movie A Family Affair—a bewildering romance with Zac Efron—and in the upcoming Babygirl, she plays an older woman drawn into a sexual relationship with a younger man. In most of these roles, she leans into cliché only to invert it. Her performances parse what visual storytelling insinuates about women, allowing her to embody a specific kind of artifice before smashing it up in front of our eyes.

Notice this Kidman bait and switch once, in fact, and you’ll start seeing it everywhere. It helps that, as an actor, she withholds more than she shows, favoring shards of insight over full reflection. In 1993’s Malice, a wily neo-noir, Kidman plays Tracy, a demure newlywed and preschool teacher who’s tormented by a diabolical doctor (Alec Baldwin)—until we learn that Tracy is much more implicated in events than she appears. The movie works only because Kidman can play in such different registers: the muted, wide-eyed bride and her thrilling, histrionic other. Over and over, her performances assert that we have no idea what her characters—and, by proxy, the actor herself—are capable of. Nadia, the Russian mail-order bride of Jez Butterworth’s 2001 film Birthday Girl, bounces unnervingly among multiple guises: seducer, charlatan, love interest.

What do Nicole Kidman’s women want? More than they’re getting. In the second half of the ’90s, Kidman completed a run of chaotically disparate roles that were nonetheless defined by a similar state of intense yearning. In Gus Van Sant’s dark 1995 satire, To Die For, she played a wannabe TV-news reporter whose ambition prickled like popping candy under the skin. In Jane Campion’s 1996 The Portrait of a Lady, she was Isabel Archer, Henry James’s determined naïf who’s conned by scheming dilettantes. Three years later, she starred opposite her then-spouse, Tom Cruise, in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, playing a married woman whose confessions of erotic dreams about other men torment her husband. The performances were all wildly different, but each character embodied the same acute frustration at being boxed in by the expectations of others. This was an era in Hollywood, as the film critic A. O. Scott wrote in 2003, in which actresses were expected to be sweethearts, adept at exhibiting “a certain kind of warmth, at once sexual and sympathetic.” But warmth has never been Kidman’s natural mode. She fascinates, but she doesn’t ingratiate.

In The Perfect Couple, as the mother of a son who’s getting married to a woman Greer sees as an interloper, she’s as chilled and taut as a corpse, gliding from room to room in neutral silks and occasionally exuding flashes of real menace. Everyone else on the show is cheerfully hamming it up—Dakota Fanning harnessing elite levels of (spoiled) brat as another daughter-in-law, Eve Hewson modeling perplexed everywoman accessibility as the bride—and amid the liveliness, Kidman’s performance feels markedly out of place. Greer works at a frenzied clip, churning out new books each year to help fund her sybaritic family’s lifestyle. In return, at family events, she enforces the deranged protocol of a minor British royal. (“Amelia, didn’t I give you a family robe to wear?” she demands of the bride-to-be; later, watching Amelia nibble at a croissant, she murmurs, “Wedding dress be damned, huh.”) Fixing an unblinking, slightly bulging gaze on anyone who crosses her, Greer is high-diva loftiness. But Kidman doesn’t seem to be having fun with the role so much as she’s trying to find its dark center. She is, you can tell, taking all of this quite seriously.

Maybe that’s because Greer’s roiling ennui is of a piece with so many of Kidman’s more recent roles—disconsolate, wounded women facing a world that writes them off, uncharitably, as depressed wine moms. Kidman has made the art of playing nebulously anguished women her own, even before 2017’s HBO series Big Little Lies, in which her character, Celeste, gradually begins to face the idea that her sexually thrilling marriage might also be abusive. The actor has long been drawn, hauntingly, to characters who’ve lost children, from Dead Calm to 2010’s Rabbit Hole (her first credit as a producer with her company, Blossom Films) to Lulu Wang’s recent Amazon series Expats. She frequently tackles, and subverts, the role of the mother. In Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2017 horror film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, she plays a woman who argues at one point that her own life is worth more than that of her children. In 2022’s The Northman, playing Queen Gudrún, she manifests an eerie, monstrous sexual authority to—in yet another fiendish plot twist—ensnare her own son.

[Read: The redemption of the bad mother ]

The space where sex and power intersect is a minefield for women performers, and it’s ground that Kidman has long claimed as her terrain. It doesn’t seem coincidental that Babygirl comes exactly a quarter century after Eyes Wide Shut, or that Kidman continues to present herself as a sexual figure in her late 50s. For the first decades of her career, passive sexuality was commonly expected from female stars—the bargain you made when you wanted top billing. Rather than accept these terms, Kidman wielded her sexuality as a weapon. In 1998, while she was one-half of the industry’s most powerful couple and still negotiating her status in Hollywood outside of it, she starred in a West End production of David Hare’s The Blue Room, playing five separate roles in a performance that one critic described as “pure theatrical Viagra.” In 2001’s Moulin Rouge, effectively her divorce movie, her courtesan, Satine, was sexual dynamite in whalebone and feathers. Kidman knows what visual storytelling wants from women, but will offer it only as part of her distinct agenda.

Being a sex symbol, as an actor, is a trap, and it’s one that Kidman has always managed to evade. Perhaps this is why a show like The Perfect Couple, which she produced, doesn’t seem so distant from the more prestigious work on her résumé after all. Greer—heightened, hyper-composed, groomed almost to death—is the unnatural extension of how women are supposed to appear in public. The obvious contrivance is the point. When, in the final episode, Kidman whips away the window dressing to divulge who she really is, Greer becomes part of a murderers’ row of the actor’s women: unexpected, discomfiting characters who demand to be seen, don’t care what we think of them, and will never compromise.