The Kidmanifesto (feat. Sam Herbst)
Coming to this place for magic
I’m pleased to welcome Sam Herbst today, the host of podcast The Kidmanifesto, to talk all things Nicole Kidman. Everyone can read our conversation about her persona and career overall, but paid subscribers will get the full conversation where we pick Kidman’s best work in six categories: quintessential, favorite, best, underrated, most surprising, and best in a bad movie.
If you want to see what this type of conversation looks like in full before pulling the trigger on becoming a paid member, take a look at my 2022 conversation about Phillip Seymour Hoffman with Jonah Koslofsky. THINK ABOUT IT!
Did you know that Nicole Kidman is on a Hulu show that is wrapping up its second season? Does it matter if you didn’t? Does that detract at all from her status as potentially one of our great working actresses?
Kidman just turned 58 last week and is in the midst of a second career renaissance where she feels akin to Schrödinger’s celebrity. She’s both as prominent as ever in culture while simultaneously being an invisible force with her prolific output and unquenched desire to keep working. It feels like we’re watching a new paradigm built in the wake of Meryl Streep’s trailblazing for women of a certain age.
There’s no one I’d rather discuss the actress and star with than Sam Herbst, the host of the podcast The Kidmanifesto. He indulged me in some light chatter about her career, her current status, and where we’d like to see her go in the future before we got into some rankings of her past work.
How did you get so interested in Nicole Kidman that you’d start a podcast about her?
First of all, I started it in 2017, which feels like 800 lifetimes ago. Growing up, she was probably one of the first people for whom I was acutely aware of, "Oh, this is an actress with a career and choices. Someone I can recognize with agency." Moulin Rouge, I remember being at day camp in middle school and kids with a boom box and having that CD. I remember seeing that over the summer, and then The Others was also really big for me, and being like, "Oh, wow, that's the same person! These are very different." And also, just being a little gay boy and being like, "Well, she's pretty and I don't really know what to do with that. But I like looking at her!"
I was trying to think of what even would have been the first Nicole Kidman movie I saw. It might have been Moulin Rouge, which I watched on HBO when my parents were out of the house. I watched it without telling them because they were strict about PG-13 movies before 13. But then I told a nice guy sitting next to me an airplane the next year, and as we were getting off, he goes, "You're letting him watch Moulin Rouge?" And my cover was blown.
My parents were very much of the school of thought, "You can watch anything, but don't come crying to us if you watch The Exorcist and you're scared."
Beyond that initial impulse of noticing that she's making choices, what do you think makes her such a great actress and star ... if you can separate those things with her?
She loves a director with a bold vision. She's working with Lars von Trier and Yorgos Lanthimos. I think she likes taking risks and being scared, like living on the Eyes Wide Shut set for a year. She is looking for a challenge. Even if you don't know that, it comes through in her work. This woman can do Happy Feet, Just Go with It, To Die For, Dogville, and these are all the same person. They're all different flavors of this thing. I think that is just really impressive. Julianne Moore, God bless her, so talented ... but you know what a Julianne Moore movie is.
She's gonna have the eyes, she's gonna do the thing, and that's why we show up. But there isn't really that for Nicole; it's all really different. That is such a fun thing to talk about, besides the fact that she's just a capital-A actress. We spent 15 years having so many thoughts about her face and how much it does or doesn't move. We can get into the validity of that, but that's crazy. She had the most famous divorce and marriage in cinema perhaps since I've been alive. She's just got it all, and she continues to do that through the decades. She started so young and never stopped. And she has been more prolific now than ever. The empire grows every year.
The podcast ran right as Kidman hit a second big wave of appreciation, which I’d attribute mostly to Big Little Lies. Do you think she’s now properly valued as an actress?
I do, and it honestly, it seems like a joke to say, but ... the AMC ad of it all. She is Miss Movies, and it's so funny because Tom is obviously Mr. Movies.
The irony that they, both in their own way, have become synonymous with the theatrical moviegoing experience....
A page was turned with Big Little Lies, and I think that's where Nicole the Mogul really steps in. Rightfully so, for a long time, she was very protective about her personal life. I don't know if it's working with Reese Witherspoon, who's all over social, but I do believe you see a change where she's being funny and loose in public. She's eating crickets for Vanity Fair, doing Hot Ones, and all of these things are not like the very cagey, private actress of ten years ago ... I think for the better. She seems to be having a blast, which is lovely to see. Now she's the queen of streaming, for better or worse,
Kidman is probably in the running for the defining film actress of her generation. Where do you think she stands among Gen X leading ladies? I’d say Blanchett is pole position, but she’s probably tied for a strong second with Kate Winslet.
She's definitely up there! I love The Hours; I think that's an incredible performance, and Denzel saying "by a nose" is a top 10 Oscar moment for me. But if you asked my mom, "What does Nicole have her Oscar for?" She doesn't know. I think that maybe works against her, but it's got to be her! If you ask [Nicole Kidman], she'll say it's Isabelle Huppert. I guess they're pretty similar in age, maybe a slight generation gap, but she's got to be a contender. She's just so prolific, if nothing else. She's got Aquaman lined up next to the 10 TV shows.
What do you make of her Oscar nominations? More so than maybe any other major actress, they feel wildly unrepresentative of her body of work.
Lion is crazy. She's perfectly fine in that movie, but that movie is very whatever. I have a ranked list from when I did the podcast, and it's not a spoiler to say that it's not very high. There's the Rabbit Hole nomination, which is very capital-O Oscar. It's a weird adaptation of a play that I think is much better than the movie ends up being. [The film] is just so self-serious and maudlin, while the play is very funny, and just so maudlin. The nominations are not very representative of her work at all because she does all this daring stuff, and you don't see it represented outside of lists.
After her AFI lifetime achievement ceremony last year, the clip where she listed off all the directors went viral. (NOTE: Click play on the video below to see for yourself.) It was an impressive list, but she doesn't always get their best work.
Stoker is a fabulous example. She got to work with Park Chan-wook, but it's like ... on THAT?
How much do you think her sometimes lackluster film choices will impact her legacy? Not that the Oscars are always the best barometer of quality, I was shocked she has only been in three Best Picture nominees … and one of which was Lion.
Even until very recently, I would see a lot of people online looking down on her career as a whole in ways that I find unjustified. I think it's going away. But it's not like she's churning out prestige right now; she's in the Netflix/Hulu zone, which is a gig and seems to be something she really enjoys. It's so funny because it's not like she's nominated for an A24 movie, and suddenly everyone's back on her side. The work's not really adding up, but I do think we're still coming around to her. I don't really know how to explain that, other than the AMC of it all. She is permanently present in the streaming and theatrical filmgoing experience, for better or worse.
Do you think she should be pickier, even if it means fewer people get employment (as she claims is part of her reason)? She does walk the walk when it comes to working with female filmmakers, in a way that Natalie Portman wants to do. She writes their names on the Oscars, but won't actually work with them.
I was hoping you would bring that up! She set a number and a date goal, and she's smashed it out of the park. It's really staggering. A lot of female directors end up in the television prestige space just because that's how our unfortunate industry works sometimes. But she really has done it. She's creating jobs, and she did not slow down, seemingly, during the pandemic or the writers' strike with the television prestige work. So you do kind of have to give it up. Do I think she needs to star in all these? Did we need a second season of Nine Perfect Strangers? Who’s clamoring for that? No one I know watches it. But would I like to see her turn around and try to do another Fincher, since that fell through? Yeah, absolutely. (Also, David Fincher's at Netflix, so what are we gonna do?)
She's not necessarily going for female filmmakers who already have a lot of clout and prestige; she's helping them get that next step. She's leveling a lot of people up, so maybe her true impact will only be felt in 20-30 years whenever these filmmakers are at the Oscars all the time.
It's not like she's not working with Claire Denis. She's working with Mimi Cave. We could see in 10 years that a lot of these people really pop off. And I guess we'll have her to thank for that, maybe.
What is the next prestige drop from her? It's crazy that The Northman wasn't that for her. People are already coming back and reappraising it and being like, "Why did we pay that movie dust?" It rips, but that could have been it for her in a way that it just like wasn't.
Is there a director that you would like to see her work with?
Claire Denis is an incredible choice in terms of continuing the trend of working with female directors. Lynne Ramsey is another one who comes to mind. Even something quieter, like a Kelly Reichardt or a Debra Granik.
I'd love to see her work with Mia Hansen-Løve and have her build a movie around Nicole Kidman just doing things.
Where's her collaboration, like Isabelle Huppert and Hong Sang-soo, that allows her to be still? I feel like so many actors lack curiosity. Aquaman aside, she really stayed out of franchises for the most part. We got close with The Golden Compass, but that didn't pan out. Television work aside, because it's serialized inherently, she has prevented herself from getting trapped doing Iron Man for 10 years.
Do you think the meme-ification of Nicole Kidman is starting to affect how people interpret her performances? I felt like people took Babygirl less seriously than they should have, and I can’t help but have this nagging sensation that people are looking at the star rather than the skill again.
Babygirl is so funny to me because I think she's incredible in it. I think that movie only works because it is so funny and so willing to laugh at its characters. It's not condescending at all about sexuality. But I see the reactions on both sides, a plague in cinema in general, in which everything is too funny. We're so glib and have to laugh at everything, so I see what you're saying about the devaluation there. People missed the forest for the trees by not realizing the film is supposed to be funny. I think both of those things hurt her. It's weird she didn't get a nomination for that.
I'm gonna chalk it up to it being a tough year.
Yeah, it's a quietly tremendous performance. She's doing crazy stuff in that movie. It's the second time the woman's had an Iron Claw boy in her targets, and it's the second time she's peed on screen. She will do whatever you need her to do, and she's not ashamed about any of the work. I do think it'll take one big prestige thing to bump her back in. I just don't know what it is yet.
QUINTESSENTIAL NICOLE KIDMAN
I think it's time to jump into the categories! Let's start with quintessential, the first line of the obituary performance, or the thing that you think she's ultimately going to be known for.
Initially, I said Moulin Rouge because she's doing it all. I settled on To Die For (available to rent from various digital platforms). It's a deceptively easy performance, and what she's doing is so complicated the whole time. Suzanne Stone is a character that you somehow root for, even though she's pretty deplorable. It's a great example of her working with a really hot director at the moment [in Gus Van Sant]. It's a piece of adaptation, which I think is another place where she thrives. It's also just insanely watchable and just like, filled with people who will pop off, like Joaquin [Phoenix], Casey [Affleck], and Matt Dillon, to extent, yeah. I just think it rules. It's such a crowd-pleaser, and she's doing incredible work in it.
Well, I did say Moulin Rouge (available to rent from various digital platforms) for the quintessential, and maybe it's just because that is the first thing where she really grabbed my attention! I think of her as such a maximalist, all-in actor, and with the Bazmataz of it all, she's giving 110% in the singing, the dancing, and the melodrama of it all. She threads the needle on how sincere and ironic that whole project is.
Yeah, it is both so tongue-in-cheek and almost sickeningly earnest. There's no reason it should work, but so is all of Baz Luhrmann's work. And he's right. This is one of the best examples of striking a balance. It's a crazy performance. She was just talking about it recently and the rehearsal process of being completely unafraid to sing in front of a room full of producers, and I'm just like, "No one does that!"
BEST NICOLE KIDMAN
Best?
I feel like there was a period where this was a cool, avant-garde answer, and now it's somehow become de facto...
I think I have a feeling what you're gonna say...
Go ahead, say it!
It's Birth (available to rent from various digital platforms).
Yeah, of course! Birth came to my attention as probably the second movie I ever watched on Netflix streaming. It had a weird logline, and I don't think I really got it. Then, I came back to it for the podcast years later and was blown out of the water by every aspect of it. I saw it on every gay boy's New York Times [top 10 films of the 21st century] list in a way where I'm like, "Damn!" Especially with the Glazer reappraisal the last couple of years, I'm like, "Well, I guess he is one of our masters, and we sort of paid him dust with this." Staggering performance. Easily her most complicated work.
There's the austerity of it all, but underneath this very brittle surface, I think there does have to be have to be this deep, throbbing heart and true belief. That movie doesn't work if she is not fully committed emotionally, even if she's not showing it.
The moment at the beginning, where the child comes in and says, "I'm Sean, I'm your husband." She's a little timid in that movie until that point, but there's something visual that you see on her face where she has become a child at that point and can no longer think clearly for the rest of the movie. She carries that, and it seems so easy. But she is doing insanely difficult work through that entire movie to make that something that you don't laugh at and take seriously. Who else. Who else?
I saw it at Metrograph two years ago, and even that irony-pilled audience had no choice but to respect this and give themselves over. I was expecting performative laughter, but it was only in places where it feels like there's meant to be that cathartic release.
Lauren Bacall saying, "I never liked Sean," is so deeply funny. Him kicking the back of Danny Huston's chair and Danny Huston also acting like a child, the movie has moments to laugh.
The Anne Heche of it all!
The way she says "Anna's little love letters" gets me every single time.
FAVORITE NICOLE KIDMAN
Best to me feels like a very objective criterion, but favorite is something that strikes something special in us.
I think this movie works for a lot of people, and the people that it doesn't, I easily understand. I put Dogville (available on MUBI). I feel like we all have decided that's a canonical masterwork ... or, maybe some of us have. It's such a crazy swing. The metatextual [element] of it all with The Dogville Diaries filming behind the scenes, and her being the only person who stands up to Lars von Trier and pushes back. Again, Lauren Bacall, a master in her own right, is there, and she doesn't have the gumption to question his enfant terrible self. But she's keeping him in check and defending members of the cast. Then, you watch the performance, and it's gangbusters for the whole time. She's not leaning on a set or any convention of traditional cinema there, because we're just looking at a soundstage. It just rules. She's cool as hell.
For my favorite, I said Babygirl (available on Max).
Say it!
Maybe I'm just holding on to the fact that people expected something so different from it, either 50 Shades of Grey or a scolding. I do feel like this era of her is still unfolding, but this felt like a neat bow around the Big Little Lies era. Here is a woman who is fully accepting of the fact that she's in her fifties. She's a mother. She still has sexual agency. She still has desire. She can make mistakes, but she's also incredibly competent. Babygirl is the synthesis of everything, and I love that it's so funny, serious, and engaging. Because she didn't get enough credit in my mind for awards, at least, it has risen to be my favorite.
That's a great choice. The more you talk about it, I'm like, "Damn, maybe we did sort of undervalue it." I think I knew when I was seeing a movie that was better than what I had anticipated was when the Sophie Wilde stuff came to a head. You're waiting for the shoe to drop, and they do the opposite of that. There are so many of those [reversals] in that movie. I thought Harris Dickinson was gonna be this professional dom with all this experience, and the movie works because he's also figuring it out and a little embarrassed. I'm like, "Well, that's hot. And also, surprising."
I think people expected the sex scenes to be hotter, frankly. But I love the way that they just bumblingly figure out what consent looks like for them. It should be a little messy, funny, and maybe a little titillating. It achieved its aims, even if it wasn't necessarily wrapped up in this pornographic package that I think people wanted from it.
MOST UNDERRATED NICOLE KIDMAN
So underrated, what do you think?
I have to put something on here that I assume people haven't seen. I was like, "Okay, where can I shoehorn BMX Bandits in here or something like that?" Unfortunately, I could not make that happen, but I settled on Birthday Girl (available for free with ads on Pluto TV), which is a Jez Butterworth movie. He's a playwright and occasional director. Birthday Girl is weird and funny. Nicole, without saying too much, plays like a Russian mail-order bride for a regular guy. She shows up and is immediately like, "I hope you didn't expect me to just stay here and be your housewife." Cohorts of hers show up at some point in the movie, and then the movie spirals into something else.
It's textbook Nicole, when you think about it, because ... well, first of all, she's wearing an incredible wig. She is working with a really hot commodity in Jez Butterworth. (Obviously, he's not a superstar director, but sort of a superstar playwright.) She is doing something that is so different from everything else in her career. The plot, not everything works, but you can see her reading that, wanting to tackle it, and maybe trying to make it work. The result, at least in the performance, is really exciting. I think it would be like an interesting watch if you were interested in Nicole and maybe had fewer gaps to fill.
[NOTE: I did have to catch up with Birthday Girl after the conversation, and it delivered on all that Sam mentioned. Commitment is Nicole Kidman's specialty, and here as in many movies, it keeps the entire movie from careening off the rails.]
I went with something a little bit more mainstream: I did say Rabbit Hole (available on Amazon Prime Video through 6/30), another playwright-directed work. It's the inverse of Babygirl where this performance got all the major precursors and the Oscar nomination. It is such a weepy, tragic film that is so unabashedly emotional about a difficult subject matter full of grieving parents yelling at each other. It's not a movie that I go back and watch frequently, and I can't say if my love for this performance was just being 18 years old and experiencing some of these thoughts for the first time. Because I think it will always bear the burden of being one of her Oscar nominations while so many other great performances got snubbed, I felt the need to stand up for Rabbit Hole. If you can handle the tragedy of it once, I think there is a lot there.
The performance is so Oscar-baity and weepy. Dianne Wiest is there as an elder stateswoman. It's also very "I am watching an adaptation of a play." I know what this play looked like; I know what it felt like; I know that it was meant to make people cry. But sometimes, you want that.
MOST SURPRISING NICOLE KIDMAN
I put Dogville for most surprising. I actually hadn't seen this until last week because I had wanted to see it in a cinema, but I finally just watched it on MUBI. I knew she was going to be very good in it, but I was not expecting such a committedly Brechtian, understated performance because I think of her as such a "leave it all on the field" actress. For her to blend in so naturally with that lack of setting and conceptual nature of the film, I can't think of any performances where she's necessarily quite so blank or so restrained.
Yeah, that's really insightful. There are so many shots in that movie where she is in the background because you were looking at someone else's house, but you can see her, and she's not pulling focus. She is just a day player in a way that we don't really see her. It's like a really unglamorous, sort of, like un-showy performance that I think is exciting to see from her, for sure.
Maybe this is a hot take: I really did not like her in The Killing of a Sacred Deer. With Lanthimos, I feel like everyone really needs to commit to his antiseptic tonal quality, and the moment when she breaks down and cries completely punctures that artificial reality for me. Given this background, I was expecting there to be some moment where it's the capital-A actress who comes in to deliver on that, but it's a full performance devoted to Von Trier's austerity.
I think Sacred Deer is so interesting as a response to her in Eyes Wide Shut: married to a doctor, the opening scene being them going to a party together, the sex scene with her and the anesthetic. In my parasocial mind, he's directly in conversation with that. I never thought about [her] breaking that, because Colin Farrell's so locked in for that dialogue.
What would you say is your most surprising Kidman performance?
I put The Paperboy (available on Amazon Prime Video and, somehow, The Criterion Channel). I certainly knew the reputation around it. People know that she's gonna pee on Zac Efron's leg. But she's gonna swing, and the movie might not hit. Also, she might not hit 100% of the time, but she's probably gonna hit 95% of the time. It's gonna be something you've never seen before. Nicole Kidman is often sexy in movies, but that character is fiercely sexual in a way that is not really present in her films. The Cahiers du Cinema book series always tries to identify themes, and hers are: she often plays mothers, specifically ones who have lost children. Sometimes, she's a businesswoman. But she's not a sexpot. This is so fun to watch her Cat on a Hot Tin Roof electricity because when you get it for her, it's Chase Meridian in Batman Forever, where she's the most beautiful woman you've ever seen, and Batman wants to have sex with her. That is one kind of sexy. The Paperboy is what it is, but she is fascinating to watch in it. I was very surprised to see that she had that in her and was able to tap into that.
I came very close to doing that as my best performance in a bad movie. I did a student program in Cannes the year that it played, and I thought I was going to the day after screening. But it had bombed so badly that Lee Daniels pulled all the subsequent screenings, nice, and I didn't know the screening slot had been rebooked with Carlos Reygadas' impressionistic Post Tenebras Lux. It was a complete 180.
And I'm sure the Cannes audience was really chill and polite about telling you were in the wrong place, too. Her festival legacy is also fascinating because she doesn't have any slam-dunk festival hits.
BEST NICOLE KIDMAN PERFORMANCE IN A BAD MOVIE
What did you end up saying for Best Performance in a Bad Movie?
There was a brief moment where I wrote Rabbit Hole on this, and I was like, "I'm taking it off because it's not fair to that movie." My one gripe with that movie is it's just so self-serious. It's very similar to the August: Osage County movie, where the movie is so dour the entire time, but the play only works because it is so consistently funny.
I thought maybe I'd put Bewitched, but then I pivoted to The Stepford Wives (available to rent from various digital platforms), which I feel like occupies the same narrative space. On paper, this should work. A remake with Nicole, and we've got Glenn Close, who I think is incredible, and Bette Midler, who is doing some good work. Obviously, it doesn't really work, but she's so funny in the sections playing a short, brown-haired wig businesswoman. Then, she gets to do a great pivot into the Stepford Wives-ing. She nails that, too, and the girl is doing everything in her power to make this a success. Every time she and Glenn Close are on screen, I'm like, "This movie is great!" And then everything around them, I'm like, "Uh-oh!"
It's so interesting that The Stepford Wives and Birth were the same year.
There are good pairings in much of the 2000s for her where you're like, "What the fuck happened here?"
I also went in a campy comedy direction with The Prom (available on Netflix), which is just an abysmal movie. But Nicole is the one person in that movie who understands what it is. She's in on the joke. To me, she's the one character who doesn't think that the actors parading into town to save the prom are these glorified heroes. I can't believe Meryl didn't seem to understand what the show was!
My hot take is that I think Meryl is really good in that. She's taking it very seriously, and so does the character. I feel like Meryl has been on autopilot for a while, and that was the first thing where I was like, "She's back!"
Nicole's number is the right amount of fun while taking it very seriously, as the character would. But it feels like the one performance you could extract from this pink pussy hat-era resistance liberal phase.
Another thing about Nicole is that she sings a lot in movies. She sings in Australia! We've got Nine, The Prom, and that cover of “Something Stupid” with Robbie Williams at the end of one of her movies. She's finding ways to sing in these things, but she's not taking it super seriously. She goes in and does the best she can, and she recognizes that's enough ... whereas Meryl Streep in Into the Woods was like, "No, Donna Murphy did not do the backing for my vocals. That is all me, and if you think that, I will sue you!" That's a good pull for that, if for no other reason than she sings a lot, and it's cool that she's not afraid to do that.
I also contemplated choosing Bombshell, a very confused movie, but her take on Gretchen Carlson is the one character that the movie seems to have a grip on.
God, Bombshell, I haven't thought about that in forever. If I think about Kate McKinnon's character too long, it actually makes me want to lose it.
Thanks to Sam for joining and yapping! Back with some New York chatter next week.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall