Nicole Kidman Had to Keep Telling Herself Not to Intentionally Drown While Filming ‘The Hours’
Nicole Kidman experienced a career highlight scoring a Best Actress Oscar win in The Hours. But she admitted she had to stop herself from going too far in her role as Virginia Woolf a couple of times.
How Nicole Kidman found herself becoming too much like Virgina Woolf
Because of circumstances surrounding her personal life, and her devotion to The Hours, Kidman went to extreme lengths to play Virginia Woolf. The Being the Ricardos actor asserted that she lived by herself in a cottage to get a better feel for the late author.
“I wanted to be isolated so that I could be with my thoughts and basically do what Virginia did — read a lot and feel isolated. It was a little like I was captive. For different roles, you do different things. For this, it was very important for me to go into her psychology,” Kidman once told Entertainment Weekly.
Apart from that, Kidman also started adopting many of Virginia Woolf’s own familiar character traits. At one point, she even submerged herself in water to feel what the author did when drowning herself. However, she had to remind herself not to go too far when doing so.
“There are some roles that you do an enormous amount of research for, and there are other things — like Lars [Von Trier’s upcoming] movie [Dogville] — where I just showed up. He said, ‘I don’t want ANY preparation whatsoever,’” Kidman remembered. “’Come as you are.’ So I did. For [The Hours], I’m playing someone who existed. She smoked, so I smoked. She wrote with her right hand, so I wrote with my right hand. She drowned, so I put myself under water. But, I had to keep telling myself, ‘Don’t actually drown yourself!’”
Nicole Kidman couldn’t believe she was expected to play Virginia Woolf in ‘The Hours’
Kidman admitted that she was anxious about playing author Virginia Woolf in The Hours. She was offered the part outright by the film’s director Stephen Daldry, which she immediately thought was a mistake.
“Well, when I read the script I thought, they can’t want me for Virginia. They must want me for something else. There’s no way I’m going to be able to pull this off. I don’t think I’m right. It’s going to be a disaster,” she said.
However, it was Daldry’s unwavering faith in her that convinced the Batman Forever star to take the role.
“Well, when I read the script I thought, they can’t want me for Virginia. They must want me for something else. There’s no way I’m going to be able to pull this off. I don’t think I’m right. It’s going to be a disaster,” Kidman added.
Even after accepting the offer, however, Kidman’s concerns about the feature only grew. Speaking to Oprah, she even shared she tried to leave the project not too long before it began filming. Which Kidman revealed was a recurring theme in her career.
“It’s terrible. It’s now a running joke with my agent, Kevin Huvane. Two weeks before shooting began, I told him, ‘I can’t do this movie. Get me out of it.’ And my agent, who’s like a brother to me, said, ‘You’re going to get on a plane and go make this movie,’” Kidman said.
Nicole Kidman’s life fell apart filming ‘The Hours’
What made Kidman get so close to her role in The Hours was the challenges she faced in her personal life at the time. Her leading role in the feature coincided with her very public divorce with Tom Cruise. This only further helped inform her performance as the respected artist.
“When I received the offer, I was fine about making the film, but by the time we got to shoot it, my life had basically fallen apart, so I was in an emotional frame of mind where I was open enough to be able to receive her. I basically absorbed her, and all of the things that she was struggling with got under my skin,” she once said according to the Golden Globes. “I have subsequently fallen in love with her. She’s an extraordinary woman and I’m so privileged to have been able to put a small part of her essence on-screen.”
Kidman’s efforts for the feature weren’t in vain in the Academy’s eyes. She ended up picking a Best Actress win for the role. But she admitted that her victory was soured by her personal issues back then.
“I was having professional success and my personal life was struggling,” she once told Harper’s Bazaar (via HuffPost).
