Glamorous Domestic Peril: The Nicole Kidman Prestige TV Industrial Complex

The second season of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers premiered last week, bringing with it yet another addition to the growing canon of Nicole Kidman TV projects (you can read Chris’s review here and my own over on TheWrap.) Kidman has been a surprisingly prolific figure on film and TV for a solid decade now, seemingly never taking a break as she leaps between mediums. In 2024 alone, she had three film credits and three TV ones. It’s the kind of schedule that would wreck most stars, but Kidman’s stamina and eagerness to challenge herself are unique among her Hollywood contemporaries. She’s that rare actress whose project choices could easily be swapped with someone like Isabelle Huppert, so fascinated by abrasive roles and risky narratives as she is. Well, she is when it comes to film. With TV, Kidman has a different agenda.

One of the most heralded film actresses of her era has carved out a strong niche on the small screen with a succession of dramas that have brought her renewed commercial clout and a slew of awards. They are not identical. One would never confuse Lioness with Expats. But there is an intriguing series of recurring themes that defines a Kidman show in the 2020s. The unexpectedness of her film work is somewhat tempered for TV as she savvily zeroed in on what audiences were hungry for in the era of Peak TV. With Kidman’s shows, you’re guaranteed something very juicy: aspirational wealth and domestic peril.

Kidman had made TV before Big Little Lies. She played photographer Martha Gellhorn in the HBO drama Hemingway and Gellhorn and done a ton of Australian shows before her American breakout. But it was the Liane Moriarty adaptation, co-produced with Reese Witherspoon, that established the new era of Kidman. The show followed a group of women living in a well-to-do coastal town whose lives are unexpectedly bound together by a series of devastating secrets. The basic set-up seemed rather standard, a typical beach read narrative that could be juicy and disposable. But the source material had far more heft than that, and Kidman and Witherspoon, together with director Jean-Marc Vallee, knew that.

Kidman played Celeste, a woman frequently described by friends and outsiders as astonishingly beautiful. Hers was the perfect life from the outside: a gorgeous house, twin sons, and a husband who looked like Alexander Skarsgard. The glossy outside concealed, however, a life of terror dominated by domestic abuse. When the show premiered, there were a lot of reviews that seemed baffled by the discovery that multi-award-winning actress Nicole Kidman was good at her job. Anne Helen Peterson talked about it in a piece for Buzzfeed, noting how her career has long been dominated by a cycle of underestimation and the ‘revelation’ of her talents. Big Little Lies was a key example of that. She understood Celeste’s fragility but also her conflict in being truly in love (and in lust) with the man who did not respect her in any way. You watch the light dissipate from this woman’s eyes over the course of the season, and Kidman makes it so painfully real. It’s no wonder she won an Emmy for it.

After that, she went all-in on TV in a way she’d never done before. Big Little Lies got a messy second season plagued by director issues (release the Andrea Arnold cut), but it remained appointment viewing because of how that first season set the world alight. She reunited with Jane Campion for the second season of Top of the Lake, where she played a newly out academic with a strained relationship with her daughter. 2020’s The Undoing, co-starring Hugh Grant, was the first HBO show to gain viewership every week over the course of the season, and was a massive hit overseas in the UK, even beating Game of Thrones.

The first season of Nine Perfect Strangers was a massive hit for Hulu. Her role on Lioness, another addition to the seemingly endless assembly line of Taylor Sheridan shows, is small but kept her visible in a new genre of TV, the spy thriller (but with ladies, because Sheridan is smart like that.) Netflix’s The Perfect Couple, the first TV adaptation of a novel by Elin Hilderbrand, was fizzy Summer viewing that only further strengthened Kidman’s TV type.

These shows are not identical but they are bound by recurring tropes. They typically focus on the lives of the wealthy and privileged, with Kidman playing impeccably polished women whose pristine images are punctured by secrets and lies. Urban or rural, the locales are typically scenic and aspirational. The action is soapy but with heft, often rooted in serious issues that impact women. Ideally, there should be a murder or two as well. A Nicole Kidman TV special is like a great beach read (and are often adapted from those novels by women like Moriarty and Hilderbrand.)

Kidman’s TV work is not without risks. Expats, directed by Lulu Wang, may still fit within the niche she has developed but it was also a far more contemplative effort than her soapier efforts (Kidman has a great eye for directors and is one of the few major stars who puts her money where her mouth is in terms of working consistently with female filmmakers). But it is not the same level of riskiness or oddness that her film work goes to. There’s nothing on her TV slate that compares to, say, How to Talk to Girls at Parties or The Killing of a Sacred Deer. That may be in part because, even if the era of streaming-dominated Peak TV, such opportunities are thinner on the ground (Kidman, work with Nathan Fielder.)

There’s a keen commercial eye at work in Kidman’s TV work that she seems far less concerned with in film. The expectations of those respective markets have drastically changed from the days when Kidman got her start in Hollywood. Television isn’t the lower option for a movie-star and few actors have the power to guarantee major box office success without an attached IP. If you’re Kidman, you can get away with making niche indie movies but, even in a hyper-crowded market of TV, you need to find a devoted audience on the small screen. And she has. Her name on a series gets people’s attention, and well beyond the crowd of fans she’s accumulated for her edgy, abrasive, and frequently deeply uncommercial film projects. It’s fascinating how she knows what the people want in this market: classic soap opera with good behind-the-scenes talents, starry ensembles, and a mystery to solve.

As a Kidman fan, I’m more fascinated by her TV work as a career move than as one of creative fulfilment. I’m always way more interested in her film choices because she makes such grand leaps into the dark with spiky auteurs and characters who are seldom easy to categorize. In Babygirl, one of my favourite films of 2024, she delved into the conventions of the erotic thriller with a subversive gaze, playing around with ideas of female sexuality while still having a sense of humour about both those concepts and herself. There’s a moment in that film where she gets Botox and her daughter mocks her appearance afterward, and it’s such a bold move for an actress who’s oft derided for her cosmetic work that it made me fully cackle. In a film where she does a lot of things that led critics to describe her as ‘brave’, that moment is what stuck with me as a sign of her canniness and nerve as a performer.

Coming soon, Kidman will play Kay Scarpetta, the heroine of Patricia Cornwell’s long-running crime series that pioneered the forensic scientist heroine trope for a whole generation of the genre. It’s another interesting addition to the Kidman TV canon: less domestic peril, more procedural drama, but still defined by a woman who is mired in human frailty and trauma. Given that she is not at all how the character is described in the novels (and they seem to have aged her up or are jumping to later novels in the canon), it’s intriguing that Kidman has committed to this project. Is it an attempt to widen the scope of her television projects or another sign of her savvy understanding of what TV audiences want? There’s always room for another crime procedural, right? She’s cracked the code and viewers want more of what she’s offering.