Nicole Kidman on Rabbit Hole | Interview

When I'm doing my research for this interview with Nicole Kidman, the image that keeps coming to mind is that of an alabaster doll with a machine gun. Is this unfair? A case of Venus-envy? A clichéd response to the phenomenon of a woman with ambition? Or just another extreme response to a woman who can inspire several emotions, but never indifference. Something to do with the almost shocking contrast between the guarded restraint of her pale-skinned beauty and the pulsing determination that must have been necessary to propel her first into being half of Hollywood’s number one power couple with Tom Cruise, and then, once the marriage ended, on to Oscar-winning form as an actress.

For the Oscar she played Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002), who once told other women writers that they needed to kill their inner self- sacrificing female,'The Angel in the House', to write well and truthfully. You suspect Kidman has followed the same approach to acting – even though her success as an actress has inevitably meant embracing the role of sex symbol, the sense of steel below that endlessly photographed surface makes her definitively more jungle cat than kitten. That frisson of danger she brings with her has accented some of her most successful roles: as the murder- inspiring weathergirl in Gus Van Sant's To Die For (1995), the repressive mother in The Others (2001), and – in a very different way – as the beautiful fugitive Grace in Dogville (2003). Put her career under a microscope, and at one level, especially by A-list standards, this makes her one of our most interesting movie stars, who for every bum film (Bewitched, The Invasion, Australia) has worked on a project that explores both difficult and fascinating emotional territory.

Yet interesting often isn't enough in a mercurial world where you're only as good as your most recent box-office takings – and in 2008 her career seemed to hit a low when Forbesmagazine listed her as Hollywood’s most overpaid star (in a survey which calculated the amount an actor earned compared to the amount of money the film made –it's difficult to know whether the blow was softened by the fact that Tom Cruise came third). Even when things are going well, the flipside to the adulation she inspires is extreme hostility – when I told people I was interviewing her, the question that came back most often was 'Does her face move?', while some Facebook groups 'devoted' to her include 'Nicole Kidman looks like an Alien with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome' or 'Nicole Kidman is Satan' (when I look there's nothing similar for Julia Roberts or Jennifer Aniston). No one has a simple relationship with celebrity, but hers seems to be one of the more volatile: the ice-storm of jibes suggests that for better or worse it can't be easy being Kidman. The alabaster doll is now superceded by another image: a woman who even at the peak of success always seems to be alone.

Maybe that has changed in recent years. After his much publicised spell in rehab in October 2006, her husband of four years, Keith Urban, remains a strong presence at her side, saying last November on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' that Kidman had 'saved' his life. As well as her two adopted teenage children, she now has a two-year-old daughter, Sunday (Baz Luhrmann recalls that, when she told him she was pregnant on the set of Australia, 'she burst into tears, of course, and I was so moved by it'). She is also tackling every mother's worst fear in her performance as Becca, a grieving parent (along with Aaron Eckhart as the father) in her latest film, Rabbit Hole, which she also produced. 'There were times when I woke in the night and was having nightmares and I was really shaken by it,' she told 'MTV News' about the filming, but the result has given rise to whispers that maybe she'll win another Oscar this year.

Trying to have a 'real' conversation with a titanic star like Kidman is never going to be a simple proposition. And for me the subject matter of her film makes it even more tricky, since my youngest sister –like Becca's son – died after being hit by a car. For me, what's so brave about David Lindsay-Abaire's script (originally a Pulitzer Prize winning play) is that it shows Becca going out of her way to befriend the most difficult character to relate to in this scenario – the driver. It's just one aspect of a refreshingly unclichéd portrait of family bereavement.

As someone whose family has gone through a similar scenario, one thing I loved about the film was the way it showed that grief comes out so differently in different people. Did you bring your own experiences to bear on this?
I've lost people. My parents are still alive, I haven't had that yet, but I've still had moments of huge loss. I think divorce can give you that sense of losing that person. When it's done in a very quick way it can leave you raw [a statement which makes you realise the emotional steel needed for her to throw that joyous, hands-in- the-air pose outside court after her divorce from Tom Cruise was completed]. I'm reluctant to imprint my own life on this character because I feel like it almost undermines her. But I certainly had ways in – I think once you have a child, that emotional tie is so profound. Particularly when you birth a child – oh my God. The power of that! The love that flows from you.

How was your birth?
I spent so long wanting to give birth. So to finally have that, it wouldn't have mattered if it was a 40-hour labour. She was the result of many, many failed attempts, so she's so wanted. That's probably why I have access to that enormous love, so the idea of losing that is absolutely terrifying. But it happens, and I want to be able to tell that story because in some way it reaches people who have gone through that.

Throughout your career you've explored some pretty dark emotional areas – in Dead Calm, The Others, Margot at the Wedding. Does it scare you doing these kind of projects?
As actors, that's what we do – we go into places that we're really scared of. When you're at drama school and working on Chekhov or Shakespeare, you're dealing with very extreme situations, sometimes very dark, and I'm not saying: "Oh no, I'm not going to do that." In the industry now there just aren't the roles that are dealing with the big scenes of life. There are a a lot of popcorn movies out there.