In her 39th year, leading lady Nicole Kidman chose exactly two roles for herself.
Both of them pathologically messed-up women who destroy the things that should be dearest. Both of them mothers who make you want to reach through the screen and carry their children to safer arms.
She chose to work for just under three months last year, and that’s the body of work she chose.
Celebrity watchers are likely to do a lot of armchair analysis about what that means coming from a woman who has spent the past few years entrenched in the personal drama of becoming the former Mrs. Tom Cruise and the current Mrs. Keith Urban, all while continuing to be one of the most famous names and faces in Hollywood.
For her part, Kidman is happy to leave the psychoanalysis to others.
Acting is “a very, very small part of my life now,” she says. “I mean, I live in Tennessee and have a place in Australia. I have a very separate life … a very full, very rich life that extends far beyond the film industry.”
If anything, the two roles she chose in “Margot at the Wedding,” out Wednesday, and next month’s “The Golden Compass” seem a testament to how far removed her professional life is from the rest of her existence.
In “Margot,” the anticipated follow-up to writer-director Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale,” Kidman plays an inept and emotionally abusive mother to a son on the verge of adolescence. In reality, she balked at that behavior and is public about her desire for another child, in addition to the two she adopted with Cruise.
In “The Golden Compass,” the adaptation of Philip Pullman’s first book in a children’s adventure trilogy, she’s the embodiment of evil, fiercely hungry for power, even if it comes at the expense of her young daughter.
In reality, Kidman says she is striving for very little: “I’m really just trying to keep my husband and I, and our own inch, in a little bubble.
“I don’t sit around and go, ‘Oh, I’ve got to find this, or I’ve got to do that.’ I just read and I respond,” she says.
The fact that she turned 40 this year means – probably more than anything – that she’ll be asked repeatedly what that number means, and what strategy she has devised to keep herself in top billing.
But even that line of questioning presumes something false about the actress: that she spends time thinking about it.
“I think your job as an actor is really just to stay carefree and be the dreamer. Everybody else can come up with the strategies,” she says.
“I suppose that comes with age, where you just really don’t place as much emphasis on all of those ideas. That’s not really where I’m at in my life – put it that way.”
