THE MULTI-FACETED OSCAR WINNER CONTINUES HER TEAR THROUGH GENRES AND FILM FESTIVALS, STARRING IN SIX DIFFERENT FILM AND TV TITLES THIS YEAR ALONE. TO PROVE HER VERSATILITY, SHE’S ENDING THE YEAR WITH A PAIR OF RELEASES: AN EFFERVESCENT ANIMATED MUSICAL (SPELLBOUND), AND THE GRIPPING EROTIC THRILLER, BABYGIRL

BY WILL HARRIS

She’s an Oscar winner, a two-time Emmy winner, a six-time Golden Globe winner, and as of earlier this year the first Australian actor ever to receive the AFI Life Achievement Award. If, however, you think these achievements are enough to cause Nicole Kidman to slow her roll and begin the process of stepping away from the spotlight, we regret to inform you that you’re sorely mistaken.

Even as 2024 begins winding to a close, not only does Kidman have a new animated film landing on Netflix just before Thanksgiving (Spellbound), but she also has a new theatrical release due out by year’s end: Babygirl, an erotic thriller co-starring Harris Dickinson that’s scheduled for a Christmas Day release, thereby making it eligible for awards season. Beyond that, there’s the forthcoming Holland, Michigan, a thriller co-starring Matthew Macfadyen (release date TBD), the Australian miniseries The Last Anniversary (coming to Sundance Now, release date also TBD), and perhaps most impressively Scarpetta, the upcoming Prime Video series in which Kidman portrays Patricia Cornwell’s fictional forensic pathologist, Kay Scarpetta.

“I’m fortunate that I’ve got a job where I get to explore emotional landscapes that are heavy, strange, extraordinary, bizarre, beautiful, deep,” Kidman told Elle earlier this year. “I don’t shy away from them, partly because I’m committed to examining life, what it means to be alive and feel.”

Although she’s famously Australian, Kidman’s life actually began in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she was born as a result of her parents being in the U.S. on student visas. Her father, Antony Kidman, was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, then became a visiting fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health. Her parents then moved to Washington, D.C. for a time, but they made their way back to Australia after three years, which is where Kidman spent the rest of her youth.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kidman entered the arts early, participating in ballet and a number of plays before making her film debut at the age of 16 in the Australian drama Bush Christmas, aka Prince and the Great Race.

“My first love was theater, and a lot of that was pantomimes,” she told the BBC in 2021. “I remember getting up on stage, I remember watching those outrageous, fun pantomimes. That was probably my first desire to be on stage.”

It was actually Kidman’s second film, however, that began the process of turning her into a bit of an Australian superstar. Teen action comedy BMX Bandits was – according to the tagline on its poster “a high-flying ride to adventure.” It also showcased a Kidman hairdo that, it must be said, has aged poorly enough that it continues to be brought up during talk show appearances even now.

“When she came in, I could tell right away that she had great dramatic instincts,” Brian TrenchardSmith told EW in 2011. “Some people are born actors. They have a grasp on how to make a line of dialogue believable. But they did not want me to cast her because she was taller than the two boys in the film. I said, ‘Are you crazy!’ She had legs up to her armpits and a big shock of red hair and a gorgeous face. The camera loved her. She was it, as far as I was concerned. She has screen chemistry and not every actor has that.”

Perhas Trenchard-Smith had forgotten, however, that Kidman wasn’t a redhead when she originally arrived on the film.

“When I did BMX Bandits, they said, ‘You’ve got really pale skin, you should have red hair,” Kidman told U.K. chat show host Jonathan Ross. “I said, ‘OK…’ And then they dyed my hair bright red. I hated it. I went to school, and everybody teased me.” After pausing for a beat, she added, “And then I kind of loved it.”

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Of course, Kidman’s Australian success soon turned global, first with the 1989 thriller Dead Calm, then with 1990’s Days of Thunder, which for better or worse teamed her with Tom Cruise, a pairing that would spark an offscreen relationship as well. Although they famously worked together again on two additional occasions (1992’s Far and Away and 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut), the couple went their separate ways in 2001.

By then, of course, Kidman had already more than proven that her bankability as an actress was in no way tied to Cruise, thanks to performances in such films as Malice, Batman Forever, To Die For, The Peacemaker, and Practical Magic, among others. Once outside of Cruise’s orbit, Kidman also began to spread her wings creatively, venturing into film production, starting with Jane Campion’s 2003 film, In the Cut.

Although Kidman has continued to find tremendous cinematic success, she’s also one of many actors who hasn’t been afraid to split her time with small-screen work, appearing in such high-profile projects as HBO’s Big Little Lies (Kidman and co-producer Reese Witherspoon have both officially confirmed a third season of the cult hit), Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, Prime Video’s Expats, Special Ops: Lioness on Paramount+, and The Perfect Couple on Netflix.

Arguably Kidman’s most significant challenge of late, however, came with the filming of the aforementioned Babygirl, which during a Q&A at the London West Hollywood in Los Angeles in October she described as requiring “an enormous amount of trust,” a situation that was aided immeasurably by having female writer-director Halina Reijn at the helm. Even so, however, Kidman admitted that she needed breaks from filming the sex scenes.

“It left me ragged,” she told Vanity Fair. “At some point I was like, I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to do this anymore, but at the same time I was compelled to do it. It’s like, golly, I’m doing this, and it’s actually now going to be seen by the world. That’s a very weird feeling. This is something you do and hide in your home videos. It is not a thing that normally is going to be seen by the world. I felt very exposed as an actor, as a woman, as a human being.”

Fortunately, the exposure seems to have paid off: in an early review of the film, The Financial Times wrote, “Many of us wondered whether the erotic thriller was even still viable in the moral minefield of 2024. Babygirl proves that the form may have matured, but it still has some moves.”

And so too, it would seem, does Nicole Kidman.