Why Nicole Kidman Never Stops Working

Kidman in Nashville on Jan. 26. Credit - Petra Collins for TIME

In the days after giving birth, Nicole Kidman found herself unable to breastfeed. “I was so terrified, asking, What just happened? Where’s my milk?” she says. “I remember standing naked in the shower, and my sister helped me. She was my source of strength. She’d had five children—she had the wisdom to pass on.”

Kidman and I are curled up in chairs beside a fireplace inside a historic Nashville home, not far from the house the Oscar winner shares with her husband Keith Urban, their two daughters, and a serene poodle named Julian. Kidman is warm and disarmingly inquisitive: she wants to hear about my postpartum experience too.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by the ease of this conversation about vulnerable moments in our lives as women. Kidman, 57, has emotionally exposed herself on screen for decades. On the drama Big Little Lies, she huddled under a towel between shooting scenes of domestic violence. In her latest film, Babygirl, she growled while masturbating on the floor. She marks all her scripts with notes about her characters, coded for privacy. Then she shreds them: “It’s too personal. I want it gone.”

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Filmmakers adore her rawness. “People believe if you have power, you don’t have to go to a place of vulnerability,” says Oscar-winning director Jane Campion, Kidman’s longtime friend. “A lot of actors won’t do that because it’s uncomfortable.” For Kidman to be truly open with a director requires a leap of faith. She describes herself as trusting to a fault. “It’s how I approach all of my relationships. I’ve been hurt because of that, but I’m still not jaded,” she says. “I’m delicate, but I’m very giving. The emotions I offer are very, very real, so I need to know that if I’m giving that to you, you value it.”

She has found that women behind the camera often offer a support reminiscent of how her sister cared for her in those early days after childbirth. And Kidman has made it her mission to use her immense star power to shine a light on emerging directors like Halina Reijn, who helmed the bold Babygirl, about a CEO who submits to an intern in a dominant-submissive affair. Many actors called out the dearth of opportunities for female filmmakers in the #MeToo era, but few followed through on promoting talent. Kidman pledged in 2017 to work with a woman director every 18 months. She has far exceeded her promise, partnering as a producer and actor with 19 in film and TV over the past eight years.

In 2023, fewer than 15% of films released theatrically were directed by women. For those who do receive funding and support, Kidman says, there’s undue pressure to “be perfect” on the first outing. “It can be changed,” she says, “but it can only be changed by actually being in the films of women.”

With curly, strawberry-blonde hair and a preternaturally intense stare, Kidman stood out among the 14-year-olds in the Sydney-area youth acting school that a 27-year-old Campion once visited to cast her student film. Kidman won the part but dropped out, fearing she’d look silly in the stocking she had to wear on her head for the costume—now one of her biggest regrets. But the two stayed in touch, and Kidman consulted Campion after making the jump to Hollywood where, at first, her newsmaking marriage to Tom Cruise in 1990 threatened to overshadow her work.

“By the time she was married to Tom, people in America didn’t understand Nicole had a whole career in Australia that was revered,” Campion recalls. “They just thought she was riding on his career. She was in despair about the roles she was being offered, and wondering how she could change her trajectory.” Kidman jumped at opportunities to work with directors she admired. A series of performances in the late 1990s, in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Sam Mendes’ staging of The Blue Room in London, proved her bona fides.

Kidman has since worked with auteur after auteur. When certain directors call, she doesn’t even read the script before saying yes: she gleefully signed onto Lars von Trier’s 2003 avant-garde thriller Dogville; Yorgos Lanthimos’ unsettling 2017 drama The Killing of a Sacred Deer; and Robert Eggers’ bloody 2022 fable, The Northman.

And, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Reijn has said that Babygirl was, in part, inspired by Kidman’s performance. In the 1999 movie, her character shares a sexual fantasy that triggers a crisis of masculinity for her husband, played by Cruise. Reijn fantasized about Kidman’s character carrying out the imagined affair. It’s the kind of evolution Kidman hopes to encourage by opening doors for women: “Stanley was dealing with it from the male perspective, and Halina chose to reinterpret it as a woman.”

Babygirl, released on Christmas, capped a year of stories about women’s sexuality in midlife. Miranda July’s best seller All Fours, the Anne Hathaway romance The Idea of You, the Laura Dern movie Lonely Planet, and another Kidman project, A Family Affair, all featured women in their 40s and 50s entangled with younger lovers. “It’s always been there—it just hasn’t been told. Maybe it’s threatening,” Kidman says. But she is, as TIME’s film critic Stephanie Zacharek posited in her Babygirl review, in her “don’t give a f-ck” era. Kidman doesn’t swear, but she admits, giggling, that the sentiment resonates. “I have the philosophy to never fight anything,” she says. “Surrender.”

She’s come a long way from the teen who was embarrassed to wear a stocking on her head, Campion says. “That was a lesson to her later: be brave.”

When we meet, Kidman has spent the previous day filming the crime series Scarpetta with Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis in Nashville and will fly to Berlin in the evening to wrap Season 2 of Nine Perfect Strangers before turning around to promote Mimi Cave’s thriller Holland at SXSW in Austin in March. Last year alone, she starred in A Family Affair, the Lulu Wang–directed Expats, Susanne Bier’s beach-set The Perfect Couple, and the CIA drama Lioness—all before Babygirl hit theaters.

Kidman is able to partner with so many female directors in part because she never stops working. “People go, ‘You’re a superwoman,’” Kidman says. “I hate it.” She doesn’t feel super—she gets fatigued like anyone else—but she’s a lifelong people pleaser. She fretted over bringing home perfect grades. If she can’t think of the exact right response to a text, she’ll ignore it for weeks. She’s often compelled to say yes to roles because doing so creates jobs. “People work when Nicole works,” Curtis says. “I’m working because Nicole is working.”

And she knows it’s a privilege. She remembers times when she contemplated quitting: “When there was nothing exciting or relevant coming my way, when there was massive criticism or bullying, when your self-esteem is shattered, when you’ve been hit with some massive loss or grief and go, ‘I don’t want to get out of bed. It’s too frightening.’”

Campion has witnessed Kidman pull herself out of moments of strife. “She’s always been a star, and that star has come up and come down, but Nicole knows that in itself is not what makes her happy. What makes her happy is her work.”

Kidman has been on a run of producing and starring in projects about privileged matriarchs whose lives unravel when a secret comes to light. It’s not that she’s particularly attracted to her glamorous yet guarded characters—those just happen to be the stories that get greenlighted. “I am so open to starting something completely a mess and shattered,” she says. “Where is it? Give me the material.”

But the part works. Audiences eat up her rich, icy characters. Campion, art house to the core, concedes there’s value in Kidman’s ability to tap into a hungry, predominantly female audience. “You can’t have power without being commercial,” she says. “You have to make money. Women want material that fits them, not just macho superheroes.”

And there’s something deceptively progressive in those stories. Prestige roles for women often involve playing the supportive wife. But in her projects, Kidman is the star, with accomplished male actors—Alexander Skarsgard, Liev Schreiber, Antonio Banderas—bolstering her performances. When she says her onscreen husbands have been egoless, I can’t help but raise an eyebrow. “I’ve worked with some of the greatest male actors in the world, and they’ve been so generous. All of them. Is that crazy?” Kidman laughs. She wasn’t intending to flip a trope on its head. She just did it.

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Styled by Stella Greenspan; hair by Italo Gregorio; make-up by Gucci Westman; production by Perfect Projects.

Write to Eliana Dockterman at eliana.dockterman@time.com.