“Where Am I Going? And What’s Next?”: Nicole Kidman Is Keeping Her Heart Open

The long-awaited sequel to a fan-favourite movie; a newly single life to ponder; the Euro Summer to end them all: has Nicole Kidman ever been more spellbinding? Giles Hattersley meets the legend in London to talk power moves, mega fashion and the art of a fresh start. Photographs by Venetia Scott. Styling by Poppy Kain.

I’m early but Nicole Kidman is earlier. So it is that I find myself legging it up five flights of stairs to the attic rooms of the west London members’ club Celeste on a Wednesday lunchtime. I’m flustered. Kidman – will it shock you to hear? – is not.

In fact, what is the opposite of flustered? Forty-three years into one of the more extraordinary film (and television and theatre and, let’s be real, fashion) careers of the past half-century, and she stands near-peerless in her combo of working lots, working well, batting away press nonsense, raising a family and, despite a heavy and innate glamour, kind of just cracking on with it in an everyday way. And, sorry to be trite, Nicole, I say, as we order two Americanos (a splash of dairy milk for her), but you also look really good doing it.

“Do I?” she says with a chuckle, warming up. Yes, in fact, you look exactly as one might imagine. “Oh, really?” Today that turns out to be a crisp, white Celine blouse, a pair of absolutely perfect black loafers from The Row and Miu Miu specs, but she’s unsure where her slouchy olive-y tan trousers are from so she hops up and tells me to have a look. Up goes the shirt and before I know it I’m rolling down her waistband and she’s asking in that tinkling Aussie-gone-global tone of hers, “Have you ever done this before?” and I giggle and tell her no, and say the trousers are from Chloé. “They’re good, right?” She adds that her black suede handbag and sunnies are both Chanel and – fashion audit complete – I tease that surely this is all the character study a woman might require from Vogue. “Haha right, that’s me!” she says, laughing. “What do you think?”

I think you’re working your legend beautifully. “I’m working my own legend?” She considers this slightly ridiculous phrase for a moment and shoots back: “Which is not working it.” Oh, I like that. “Oh, you do, do you?” she replies, amused, following it up with one of those insuppressible, piercing laughs you sometimes catch her letting rip on screen.

What a babe. Or, as Susanne Bier, Kidman’s frequent collaborator in recent years, who directs her and Sandra Bullock in this autumn’s weapons-grade nostalgia-fest Practical Magic 2, puts it: “She is the ultimate seducer – and I don’t mean that in a sexual way. She has an incredibly enticing energy, where you get very willingly drawn into her sphere. She’s from outer space.” Too right. You feel it in minutes. The wit, the warmth, the confidence. Charli xcx, a new pal (Kidman is always making new pals), puts it in a more Charli way: “She’s one of our last truly legendary movie stars,” she texts me, appropriately awestruck. “She came to my show in New York when I was on the Brat tour. I couldn’t believe she came. Like, the Nicole Kidman is at my show… what the fuck?”

And yet here she is once more, in an attic in Notting Hill, flesh and blood, in the thick of life, newly divorced as it happens, her youngest daughters Sunday Rose, 18, and Faith, 15, off at the Schiaparelli exhibit at the V&A, with a smile on her face and a flat nearby. “I’ve had it for 20 years… 21 actually,” she explains of her London bolthole. Not that you’d know it. “I’m stealth,” she says once we’ve settled, a tickle of pride lifting the corners of her mouth. “I’m good at slipping in and slipping out of everywhere.”

Turns out she’s been stealth-maxxing all summer. “London, Ibiza, Paris, Portofino…” she reels off her travels these past weeks. “A Euro summer,” she adds, a nod to singer Zara Larsson’s current sunshine earworm, bang on trend as ever. Though seriously, what does a Nicole Kidman night out in Ibiza even look like? “It’s a small dinner party or it’s a rave,” she replies. “I’m either playing Scrabble or I’m out. It’s that simple,” she says, and laughs again. What does the rave option entail? “Dinner at 10.30pm, club at 1am. I’ll put on glasses. Sometimes I’ll wear a wig to hide, a little dark wig, and then I can just dance. As long as I’m surrounded by people – like, I take people with me – then I’m fine. I need it.”

Clearly. In Portofino last weekend she “inexplicably” found herself up on stage with the band at the Splendido one evening, tambourine in hand. In London the weekend before she sat in the royal box for the Wimbledon men’s final. She adores tennis. “It’s almost like I hear that tennis ball and it puts me into a state of relaxation” – though she was “flambéed” by the heatwave. “People were like, ‘Why didn’t you wear a little summer dress?’ And I’m like, ‘Because my skin will burn no matter how much sunscreen I put on.’ So I did a full suit and tie. And a hat. And sunglasses and a fan.” Weren’t you baking? “I was drenched,” she cries. “But I always make sure I still smell good.”

What’s your perfume? “I have a secret mix,” she replies cryptically, tilting her chin low. I would have left the fragrance detail out but, a few moments later, it feels noteworthy when she adds that she started wearing this tincture again recently for the first time since her early 20s. Not to pop-psych a perfume but… one assumes Kidman has been on a fair old ferret through her own life story these past months. It was only last September that she filed for divorce from her husband of 19 years, Keith Urban, the New Zealand-born, American-based singer-songwriter and guitarist. She begins testing out some potential summations for this moment in time. “Free falling?” she posits. “Jumping off?” She takes a beat then says more simply: “Like, where am I going? And what’s next?”

Well first: a step back. This September blow the dust off your Ouija boards and gather the gals because Practical Magic 2 arrives in cinemas with the comforting swoosh of a spiral of autumn leaves whipped up by a witch’s spell. Can you believe it’s been 28 years – 28! – since the original began its journey to cult status among tweens, the spookily inclined or indeed anyone who has ever felt profoundly let down by a man and wished they had a sister, some goth-adjacent fashion and a book of spells to sort it out.

“It was the fans,” says Kidman of the urge to reanimate the Owens sisters – her and Bullock’s scandal-wrought characters, New England siblings and owners of one of the best Shaker kitchens in cinema history – nearly three decades on. “It was an actual demand from people. They were like, ‘Do we get this? Can we please?’” Alice Hoffman, whose series of books the films are based on, had published an appropriate tale. “Then it was whether Sandy wanted to do it,” Nicole says, smiling. They are, she explains, for all their mutual affection, very different animals. “Let’s put it this way,” she says. “I’m like: ‘Why not?’ and she’s like: ‘Why?’”

Bullock gets in touch to confirm Kidman’s take. “Nic and I are very different. But our differences create the most fabulous dynamic. Whether we are fighting or loving on each other, we need each other. To watch how that shows itself on screen even surprises me. You can’t explain ‘chemistry’, it just is,” she says. “And we have it.”

As Gillian and Sally, present-day witches, living under a generational curse that finishes off any man they fall in love with, they are joined in this new instalment by Maisie Williams and Joey King, as Bullock’s grown-up daughters. Needless to say, heart-warming mayhem and somewhat visceral peril ensues. “Nicole and I hadn’t seen each other for decades with the exception of a run-in on a red carpet,” Bullock continues. “But somehow we seamlessly stepped right back into these two sisters’ shoes like no time had passed at all.”

It wasn’t lost on Nicole – or “Sandy” – that a summer in London, where they shot the sequel last year, slotted in nicely with the school holidays. Mothers of teenagers, they decamped with their families to the UK and, amid the rigours of making a big-budget studio film, found time to go to events such as Glastonbury, Wimbledon and Coldplay concerts. Though Susanne Bier is quick to emphasise that – material and logistics aside – the work is never not serious. The first film, genre-defying and eccentric, with its core messages of women’s solidarity, self-acceptance and – amid the wisecracks and delicious production design – the bleak realities of falling for bad men, accumulates more fans every year (thank you, TikTok clips). “So what’s really changed?” says Bier, dryly, of 2026. “But here’s what I love about her,” she continues, talking about the Kidman method. “For all her beauty, she’s got no vanity. I mean, you stand next to her and you get intimidated, because literally her legs are as long as I am. But she doesn’t really care. For her, her work is never about how she looks.”

So, yes, the fashion is fun – Bullock says she held onto a key ’90s look from the first film that returns for the second; “I felt like I was carrying the Holy Grail when I brought it over to England for the shoot” – and Kidman was very much in the mood for levity (“I’ve done so much heavy material”) but that didn’t stop the latter’s tendency towards emotional excavation from taking over.

“Because families do carry all sorts of trauma that at some point has to be broken,” she says, her easy charm shifting into something closer to enveloping intensity as she leans in to make her point. “Families have secrets. They have things that you’re trying to protect your children from. So how do you do that?” She takes a pause. “Or should you be doing that?”

How does Kidman wear her mythology this lightly, I wonder, as she sips her coffee and asks me where I like to work out. The woman starred in Kubrick’s final film, for crying out loud. She sat for Irving Penn. She basically invented the Hollywood and high-fashion matrix by, at the 1997 Oscars, wearing a chartreuse Galliano for Dior gown that became so famous it augured the very notion of couture on the red carpet, and billions in revenue that have since tumbled into fashion houses the world over. She’s won nearly every award. She’s redefined the television thriller. She spent a decade married to Tom Cruise. She is Satine.

And yet she just… chats. Unbothered by status – “I honestly couldn’t care less where I am on the call sheet or even the billing” – she has somehow endured decades of intermittent hellfire from the press and still come out believing that “people are kind”. While she jokingly claims “I never leave my apartment,” she’s always out and about. She took Sunday, Faith and two of her nieces to see the hit Ava Pickett play, 1536, the other night (“Loved!”), although, granted, she found it somewhat exposing because, en masse, the Kidman women are some tall drinks of water. “God, there’s not one of us under 5ft 10in,” she says, amusement twinned with panic. “Literally these giants walked into the theatre.” Nevertheless they’ve been on a theatre tear this summer: The Guilty at the Donmar; tonight The Oresteia at the Bridge Theatre. Are you going back on stage? “Yeah I’d love to,” she says. She owns the rights to a couple of plays she’s keen on – but who knows when exactly, and squaring eight shows a week with family life is tricky. But let it be known, London: she’s coming.

A notorious workhorse – the internet is forever scratching its head as to how she can be in so many projects – she consumes more art than she makes. She reads constantly – Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is on her bedside table – but it’s as likely to be philosophy, collected essays, even medical journals. Poetry has been a balm especially these last months. “I’ve been reading a lot of David Whyte and Philip Larkin.” She pauses, a touch faraway suddenly. “Always Larkin.”

Quietly, last September, Kidman filed for divorce from her second husband Keith Urban in Nashville. By January matters were complete: irreconcilable differences; shared custody; no spousal support required by either party and no one had to go to court. She’s not going into the particulars but she’s processing. “I’ve approached my whole life like that,” she says of her “feelings first” approach, be it professional or domestic. “That’s just who I am. I don’t overthink things and I’m probably not that analytical. I’m far more feeling-centred and I lead with my heart. I just go, ‘OK, what do I feel here? I’ll give it a go.’ It throws people, because I think they think I’ll be far more measured and I’m not.”

“I can still approach things intellectually,” she continues, smiling, “but my desire is not to be ruled by my head. I’ve always wanted to live a well-examined life, so what does that entail? Trying things, making mistakes, failing, getting back up, moving on, embracing love, staying open, keeping the heart open and the possibilities.” This has, she allows, not been the easiest year. “But at the same time I’m like, ‘OK, I didn’t expect this. I had a different view of what my life was going to be, but this is what it is now.’ You make all these plans and you have all these ideas of what it’s all going to be like and then it’s… not. You have to adjust. You adapt. The future, it’s completely unknown to me right now.” She pauses, takes a sip of her coffee. “Strange.”

Is it scary too, I venture? “There was a point where I was very fearful and deeply vulnerable,” she replies, “which is exposing. And then at the same time [I’m] going, “Well, I can either really not confront it and just curl up, or I can just go forward with an enormous amount of hope.”

It’s worth noting how measured, light-filled almost, her tone is. “It requires time and I have had so many older women in my life who are incredible mentors,” she says. “I had my mother and then I have another woman who sort of helped raise me since I was 16. Part of the way they approach life was sometimes [to say to me]: ‘Nicole, you just got to take it on the chin.’ Once you accept that, instead of going, ‘Well that’s not fair or it’s unjust,’ you go, ‘Well, yes, actually it isn’t fair. Because things are not fair.’” She smiles again. “I know my character. I know my talent. I know who I am. If I make a mistake and it doesn’t connect, or something goes wrong in my life where it’s humiliating, it’s OK. Other people have had that and that’s OK. Take the onus off it.”

Is there any useful carry-over from having had one hugely scrutinised break-up many years ago to this time, I wonder? At this, Kidman throws her hands up and laughs incredulously. “It’s all new.” Every time? “Every time!” So, yes, she is grateful for good poetry. But above all she is grateful for family. “It’s an extraordinary purpose. Everything else is not important. These kids now, that’s what we drop everything for.” Her message for them is unequivocal. “‘It’s OK, we’re here. You’ve got people who love you, who are going to hold your hand and get through it.’”

To be fair, Kidman & co are having some good times by the sounds of it. Euro summer aside, she’s kept all of her iconic fashion from over the years ready and waiting for them. “[Sunday] is so her own creature. She has such a strong sense of identity and what she loves. She’s very European in her style. She’s very visual. She takes photographs and she makes films and she’s highly creative with that. And then the little one, even though she’s not little, just did the Vogue school and loved it. She has what I call the ‘Bessette’ style. They’re both very different though they look very similar.”

Fashion weeks – when school allows – are becoming a family affair. Sunday has walked for Dior twice now, while Kidman, a house ambassador for Chanel no less, can be found shooting the breeze with A$AP Rocky front row at their shows, or wearing Matthieu Blazy’s latest heavenly confection to co-chair the Met Gala last May. She adores his clothes and says she’s “loving” getting to know him. “He is so delicate and so gentle and such a hard worker, yet he stays so true to that beautiful silhouette. I just tried on a couture piece. I was like, ‘This feels like everything and nothing.’ So beautifully made, just a whisper of a dress. That is so difficult to do.”

She would know. A die-hard fashion fan, she credits her mother and grandmother, both gifted seamstresses and embroiderers, for teaching her that the pursuit of an intellectual life need not be anathema to beautiful clothes. At the Chanel Cruise show in April in Biarritz, Kidman looked so major in a black column dress and mini sunglasses – Vivien Leigh meets ’90s supermodel – the internet lost its mind. How do you turn it on like that, I ask? “Strangely enough, I feel comfortable. Is that weird? That’s so weird,” she says, laughing. “But you have to remember literally, because of who I married at such a young age, I was thrust into it since I was 22.” Film cameras, flashbulbs, fashion – all eyes in every room she ever walks into staring her down. She’s naturally quite shy, she says. But turning it on is all she knows at this point. “[My life has been] more time like that than not. My memory of it not being that is quite blurry, because I was really young.”

She lets out a whistle of fond disbelief. “Yeah, I got married so young,” she recalls of her decade with Cruise. “Suddenly I was 22, 23 years old and I had this huge movie star husband. But it just seemed completely natural. We just fell madly in love and it was that simple. I remember people saying to me, ‘OK, well this is really going to affect your career.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t care. I’m in love. I want to be married.’ And then I was his ‘wife’ and they were like, ‘See, we told you.’ I’m like, ‘So what? I wasn’t meant to marry the man I love? Of course I’ll throw my career away. I don’t care.’”

As last laughs go it’s a pretty good one. To Die For, Eyes Wide Shut, The Others, Moulin Rouge!, The Hours, Dogville, Birth, Rabbit Hole, Paddington, Being the Ricardos, Babygirl… “She’s one of those women who doesn’t just make movies – she is the movies,” Teyana Taylor points out. Kidman and Taylor, Oscar-nominated for her turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, became fast friends on the last awards circuit. “Nobody really knows this,” Taylor tells me, “but on Oscar Sunday I was a bundle of nerves. I was running late, emotions were everywhere. Nicole and I were both getting ready at the same hotel because we were both wearing Chanel, and somehow our paths crossed right before we left. It felt like perfect timing. She calmed me down, reminded me to breathe, to enjoy the moment, to really savour it because I had earned it. Before I stepped into one of the biggest moments of my career, I got to stand beside someone who had walked that road so many times before – and instead of making it about herself, she made sure I felt steady.”

Kidman credits understanding your talent, as well as being really, really hungry for it, as the fundamentals of movie stardom – two qualities she sees in Taylor. She turns 60 next year and it’s inarguable that her own power has never been greater. So she uses it. In 2017 she pledged to work with a woman director every 18 months to help bridge the industry’s gender gap, and has clocked up more than 20 collaborations already. “I just think there are some people who are wired to work,” she says. “I just am.”

“I do have a sort of mind-over-matter thing,” she continues. “I have it with pain. They say redheads feel pain more, but I’m known to be able to push through. It all hurts a lot and you still keep going. It’s probably from having started work when I was 14.” Growing up in Sydney seems an unlikely start, but perhaps this life of hers – a beguiling, near-anachronistic old-Hollywood existence – was always fated for her. Her smart parents – her mother is a nursing instructor and member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, her father a biochemist and clinical psychologist – brought rigour to her upbringing, then set her free. So, yes, there were books and ballet, but also a little space to tear away.

Oh, how she loved clothes. “I would save all my money because it literally felt like your life could change with a piece of clothing, which sounds insane, but I think many people have that. ‘Someone will notice me, think I’m pretty and want me and my life will change.’” She laughs. “I’ve said it before but I used to go to trans clubs. That’s where I learnt to do my hair and make-up. I would sit down as a little freckled-faced red-headed girl and they would make me beautiful.”

“They would do my lashes and straighten my hair and put hairpieces on me and make-up. I would walk out of there and I would feel pretty. I would feel like I was transformed. And so that’s probably where it all started for me – clothes and make-up and hair – and then all of it mixed with studying literature and loving acting.”

She beams at this, the full star wattage of her smile filling up the attic room like a studio light.

“I was like, ‘Oh!’” she says, as the memory lingers just a moment longer. “Now I get it.”

Via: British Vogue