Why Does Nicole Kidman Keep Repeating Herself?

What more could possibly be left to say about TV’s post-Big Little Lies profusion of glossy domestic thrillers? You know the type: Wealthy family. Female protagonist. Best-selling source material. A picturesque backdrop, shot with prestige-coded elegance. A name-brand creator or director. A cast of famous actors, at least one of whom is an executive producer, dressed in quiet luxury, making big, emotional scenes. A murder or a sexual assault or a missing person. Every character has a secret or five, which means that just about everyone is a suspect.

The Perfect Couple, now streaming on Netflix, adheres so closely to this brief—and is so unapologetically superficial—that the only surprise is how much fun it wrings out of a story saturated with soap and tropes. Susanne Bier (the Danish filmmaker who’s now best known for HBO’s silly Lies follow-up The Undoing and the meme-bait Netflix movie Bird Box) directs the adaptation of the novel by beach-read eminence Elin Hilderbrand. Eve Hewson (a wonderful actor whose last contribution to this subgenre was Netflix’s ridiculous Behind Her Eyes) stars as Amelia Sacks, a humble zoologist who is about to marry into the blue-blooded Winbury clan when a member of the wedding party is found dead at their Nantucket estate on the morning of the nuptials. The stacked cast includes Liev Schreiber, Dakota Fanning, The White Lotus’ Meghann Fahy, and, somehow, French film icon Isabelle Adjani. Its biggest name is also its least surprising: Nicole Kidman. The Lies and The Undoing lead has become ubiquitous in a particular type of role in this particular type of project. By now, the A-lister’s very specific form of overexposure constitutes a more fascinating mystery than any whodunit in which she appears.

If The Perfect Couple is the quintessential series of its kind, then Kidman’s part, as Amelia’s future mother-in-law, Greer Garrison Winbury, is quintessential 2020s Kidman. The gorgeous matriarch of a wealthy family (see also: Lies, The Undoing, Expats), Greer is, like her character in the recent Netflix film A Family Affair, a successful author. As in Nine Perfect Strangers and, again, Expats, her murky past is a source of pathos as well as suspense. This sort of Kidman character projects an icy perfection that belies inner turmoil. You can tell she’s unraveling when redness creeps into her porcelain features, rimming teary eyes and inflaming delicate nostrils.

Not all of these titles are thrillers. While Expats downplays its mystery elements in favor of grounded drama, A Family Affair is a romantic comedy that pairs marquee stars with a made-for-TV script. Nor are these the sole projects in which Kidman has recently participated; since the second season of Lies aired in 2019, she’s also played Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos, appeared in her second Aquaman movie, and re-teamed with her Lies husband Alexander Skarsgård for Robert Eggers’ Viking epic The Northman (this time she was his mother), among other roles. What’s curious is that such a sought-after actor would make time for so much similar small-screen work, to the extent that every few months, she seems to be back on our televisions playing yet another rich mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

This is, after all, the woman who won an Oscar for her portrayal of a restlessly intelligent Virginia Woolf in The Hours and collected nominations for everything from Baz Luhrmann’s maximalist musical Moulin Rouge! to Lion, an emotional drama of intercontinental adoption. In the international arthouse, Kidman was becoming the Anglophone answer to Adjani or Isabelle Huppert, inhabiting women pushed to their psychological limits. She offered up her marriage to Tom Cruise for dissection in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. She embodied a uniquely American sort of scapegoat in Lars von Trier’s harrowing Dogville. She pushed boundaries of taste in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, in which her widowed character meets a 10-year-old boy who claims to be her reincarnated husband. Her TV work is never less than solid; she’s fine in The Perfect Couple. But the more she allows herself to be typecast, the more her haunted-mom characters feel like pastiches of the singular performances she was giving a few decades ago.

In interviews, Kidman consistently cites two criteria for choosing projects. From an artistic perspective, she gravitates toward psychologically challenging characters. “I’ve pushed myself into places that I don’t find comfortable,” she has said, by way of explaining her attraction to The Undoing heroine Grace Fraser, a Manhattan therapist in deep denial about her charming husband’s (Hugh Grant) true nature. “I’m interested in philosophy and the human psyche. I’m interested in stoicism.” It’s a thoughtful response and a noble aim, but not one that necessarily lends itself to novelty. Kidman’s recent characters may be complicated and multilayered, but their personalities, problems, and lifestyles are often so similar as to be mostly interchangeable.

She also seizes opportunities to collaborate with, and foster the careers of, women. To her great credit, she’s far exceeded the promise she made, in 2017, to work with a female director once every 18 months. (That vow may also explain why viewers have been seeing so much of her: “I could rest,” she said in 2021, admitting that she was indeed tired. “Or I could actually do what I promised I’d do.”) And she isn’t just acting. She launched a production company, Blossom Films, in 2010 and has served as an executive producer of all her recent TV series. In the case of The Perfect Couple, she shares that credit with Bier, Hilderbrand, and writer and showrunner Jenna Lamia (Good Girls). Kidman’s superstar presence plays no small role in getting the shows and movies she champions made. In a recent interview, she explained that, while many actors refuse to work with first-time directors, “the thing I love to do is to be able to carve a path for filmmakers, writers, actors and people that haven’t been given the opportunities that I have and to be able to share that; to bet on people that haven't necessarily been able to show their worth yet; to stand there and hold somebody's hand and walk through the fire with them.”

In an industry where many of her colleagues pay lip service to inclusion but just keep working with the same established white guys, she has been an intrepid and steadfast supporter of new talent. Sometimes, that mission yields work as daring as the movies that made her reputation. Kidman set the Venice Film Festival ablaze last month with the sexually explicit Babygirl, from Danish filmmaker Halina Reijn, which casts her as a tech executive caught between her devoted husband (Antonio Banderas) and a young intern (Harris Dickinson) eager to indulge her BDSM fantasies. Other times, her ability to package a fresh voice in a way that’s attractive to a studio or streamer may well take precedence over certain artistic considerations. Expats, which paired her with The Farewell auteur Lulu Wang for the latter’s first TV series, was her best show since the first season of Lies—but Kidman’s unmoored character was among its least exciting elements. It wouldn’t be surprising, either, if domestic thrillers based on established IP were the kind of project Hollywood, in its eternal sexism, was most likely to adequately compensate a 57-year-old leading lady and a rookie female creator to make.

You’d have to be a bigger snob than me to resist the brain-emptying pleasures of The Perfect Couple. Not every show has to be a masterpiece to be a good time, nor does being a great actor require career-long genuflection at the altar of cinema (but thank you, Daniel Day-Lewis, for your service). Sometimes what is healthy for the industry isn’t the same as what makes great art. Even so, it can be a drag to see a performer capable of what Kidman achieved in Dogville and Birth and even that one AMC Theatres ad so often choose to repeat herself instead.

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