Nicole Kidman / The Undoing
These are the best of times for Nicole Kidman. The Australian star is as active and relevant as ever and shows no signs of slowing down. Over the last few years, she has delivered arguably the finest performance of her career in the critically-acclaimed HBO TV series, Big Little Lies, which completed streaming its second season of episodes last summer. Season One earned Kidman both an Emmy and a Golden Globe award for best actress, and critics raved over her work. Earlier this year, she co-starred opposite Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie in Bombshell, a film about the fall of Fox News boss Roger Ailes over sexual harassment charges. Previously, Nicole gave a sensitive and nuanced performance in The Goldfinch, a film based on Donna Tartt’s sprawling novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2014.
Now she’s about to star in THE UNDOING, a six-episode limited series written and created by David E. Kelley and slated for broadcast on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV beginning on May 18. Kidman plays Grace Fraser, a prominent Manhattan psychotherapist whose new self-help guide, “You Should Have Known,” is about to be published. The book criticises women for failing to recognise certain disturbing traits about the men in their lives, advice that comes back to haunt her.
Grace lives with her husband Jonathan, an acclaimed physician (Hugh Grant), and their young son Noah, and appears to be enjoying a very full and rewarding life. Her world begins to crumble, however, following a violent death and the terrible revelations that follow the disappearance of her husband. Grace then struggles to rebuild her life amid public recriminations that she should have heeded her own advice with respect to Jonathan.
“I’m playing a character that’s very intense, so I’m in the process of ‘shedding’ her now,” Kidman said at the series’ preview in January. “It’s a very strange feeling. When I’m working on a film, I don’t have time for myself. You’re working on adrenaline, and there’s an enormous amount of fatigue. Now I can do some yoga if I want to. I can go to the beach. I take hot baths with lots of oil”…