Nicole Kidman: Why Nicole Kidman Has Been Stuck In Clichéd And Repetitive Roles As The “Sad Wife”
Nicole Kidman: Nicole Kidman is a true master of versatility and a daring risk-taker in cinema. However, while her film work is vast and diverse, her television roles have become trapped in a narrow mold.
Is the female protagonist of your favorite current TV series not feeling at ease in her multimillion-dollar home? Is there a good chance she’s hiding a dark secret? Does she like to gaze contemplatively at sunsets, cityscapes, or ocean waves? And most importantly, does her hair look impeccable even when she’s under severe stress? If you answered yes to all these questions, congratulations: your show has passed the Nicole Kidman test. In fact, there’s a 99% chance Kidman is playing the lead role.
Nicole Kidman, Over much of the last decade, Kidman has repeatedly been drawn to scripts that ask her to portray beautiful women of high economic standing, burdened by both cashmere shawls and tense pasts. She has become the go-to actress for playing the “sad wife” in TV dramas, excelling at portraying women barely holding it together—while looking dazzling in the process.
Nicole Kidman Has Been Stuck In Clichéd And Repetitive Roles As The “Sad Wife”
Nicole Kidman, Did you recently read a psychological thriller in which a wealthy lady is pushed to the brink of a mental breakdown by a suspicious death or a disastrous disappearance? You can bet that Kidman and her production company, Blossom Films, have snatched up the rights (unless her friend Reese Witherspoon got to it first).
For example, Kidman’s latest flashy Netflix project, The Perfect Couple, is based on a bestselling novel by American author Elin Hilderbrand. In it, she plays Greer Garrison Winbury, the matriarch of an affluent, Protestant, white American family and a wildly successful author who’s even graced the cover of Time magazine.
Nicole Kidman, Greer moves with the poise of a delicate, highly distilled (and expensive) perfume, always clad in tasteful pastels. Her grand mansion in Nantucket, Cape Cod, is being prepared for her son’s wedding—until a dead body washes up on the shore the morning of the event. During the ensuing police investigation, cracks in Greer’s life—including her seemingly perfect marriage to Todd (played by Liev Schreiber)—begin to show. With all this emotional turmoil to cope with, it’s no surprise that she spends time staring at the Massachusetts horizon while sipping on a gin and tonic.
If all this sounds suspiciously familiar, it’s because there are strong similarities to Big Little Lies (2017), the series that marked Kidman’s major entry into TV as a troubled wife (though she had already appeared in The Stepford Wives in 2004 and as a mother with a secret in Top of the Lake’s second season). Big Little Lies set the template. Adapted from Liane Moriarty’s novel by David E. Kelley, it showcased the tumultuous private lives of very wealthy women living in luxurious, modern beachfront homes (this time in Monterey, California) and also began with a murder investigation.
In Big Little Lies, Kidman gave a layered, psychologically complex portrayal of domestic abuse as Celeste, a beautiful lawyer whose controlling and violent husband made her life a living hell. Her performance, one of the strongest storylines of the show, earned well-deserved Emmy and Golden Globe awards. However, since then, Kidman has found herself stuck in a series of roles that feel like watered-down versions of her triumph in the first season of Big Little Lies (whereas the second season was hit-or-miss and featured less of Kidman).
Nicole Kidman Looks Surprised
Nicole Kidman, In 2020’s The Undoing—another Kelley series and her first collaboration with The Perfect Couple director Susanne Bier—Kidman played Grace, a wealthy New York therapist whose life is upended by the brutal murder of a young mother at her son’s school. Most of the series had her wandering Manhattan in a flowing pre-Raphaelite wig and a series of coats best described as “Middle-earth chic.”
In 2021, Kidman appeared as a wellness guru in Nine Perfect Strangers, adapted from another Moriarty novel. But behind her Russian accent and messy blonde wig, this character also dealt with familiar traumatic clichés. Earlier this year, she portrayed a wealthy, elegant woman dealing with the aftermath of her child’s disappearance in Expats, an Amazon series set in Hong Kong—another repetitive iteration of the same old theme.
Nicole Kidman, There may be slight differences in the characters—Greer in The Perfect Couple is a bit sharper and more outspoken than the usual “sad wife,” with lines like “what’s with the wedding dress, huh?” when she sees her future daughter-in-law (played by Eve Hewson) eating bread. But for the most part, these roles feel like a regressive trend for Kidman, and for viewers alike.
Nicole Kidman, Big Little Lies managed to be both satirical and empathetic. Yes, the camera focused on beautiful homes, but the show also offered sharp insight into the inner, darker lives of its main characters. Since The Undoing, however, these series lack intelligence and focus on little more than the wealth of their protagonists, without any interesting commentary.
Nicole Kidman, What’s particularly puzzling is the gap that seems to have emerged between Kidman’s film and television work. Her film roles have remained thrillingly diverse. She’s the woman who managed to earn back-to-back Oscar nominations for two wildly different roles: first as a turn-of-the-century cabaret singer dying of tuberculosis (in Moulin Rouge! 2001), and then as Virginia Woolf (The Hours), for which she won the Oscar.
Recently, she played a terrifying Viking queen in The Northman (with an equally terrifying wig), embodied comedy icon Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos, and took on one of the strangest roles in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer, portraying a surgeon’s wife who faces an unthinkable moral decision.
Nicole Kidman, So, if there’s anyone who can boldly take on any screen role—prosthetic noses, daring wigs, strange accents, or sex scenes—it’s Kidman. She’s a true chameleon and a master risk-taker in cinema. Yet, while her film work is wide-ranging, her television work has become confined.
How did she get stuck in this limited spot? Maybe she just enjoys spending time in beautiful locations, wearing stylish outfits, and making gorgeous but not-so-challenging miniseries. But her era of playing “the sad wife” also points to a broader problem in television: one successful series spawns a set of weaker imitations.
Nicole Kidman, Instead of considering all the elements that made a series successful—like Big Little Lies’s great ensemble cast, smart structure, emotional depth, and focus on women over 40—producers seem to think a watered-down version of the plot is enough.
Nicole Kidman, While it might be entertaining to watch Kidman strolling around Nantucket in a strawberry-blonde wig and chic wide-legged trousers, this repetitive strategy diminishes her great talents. Give us Nicole Kidman in space! Give us Nicole Kidman solving crimes like Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown! Or, if we really want to break the mold, give us Nicole Kidman as a woman in a happy marriage, with no secrets, whose hair looks a little messy in the mornings.
The Perfect Couple is now available on Netflix.
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