Why Working With Nicole Kidman Was Once a Horrible Experience for Miles Teller: ‘She Didn’t Talk to Me at All’
Miles Teller and Nicole Kidman first worked together in the 2010 movie Rabbit Hole. As a newcomer at the time, Teller spoke very highly of the Being the Ricardos star and how much he admired her.
But Teller and Kidman didn’t hit it off at first, mosly because Kidman refused to talk to the young actor. However, Kidman’s silent treatment was for a specific reason.
Miles Teller couldn’t separate Nicole Kidman the celebrity from Nicole Kidman the co-worker
At the time of Rabbit Hole, Miles Teller was just getting his feet wet as an actor. Because of this, he was meeting up close with several celebrities he once watched from afar on a movie screen. One of those celebrities he admired was Nicole Kidman, who he not only met, but found himself collaborating with.
“It was very much a larger-than-life, surreal experience, you know, going from seeing these people that you’re a fan of and then you’re working with them,” Teller said in an interview with BlackBook. “It’s similar with sports. You can watch these people growing up and then be in the same industry as them.”
But with sports, usually, older athletes are too old to keep up with the young guard. Teller asserted that acting was different in that younger actors could find themselves actually collaborating with the older generation.
“That’s the weird part about being an actor. You come in and you have to be on the same plane as them,” he shared.
But when Teller and Kidman first worked together, things didn’t go the way the Whiplash actor thought they would.
Why Nicole Kidman wouldn’t talk to Miles Teller in ‘Rabbit Hole’
As surreal as it was, Teller also initially found working with Kidman to be a horrible experience. The War Dogs star described how Kidman gave him the silent treatment early on in a resurfaced interview. But slowly, she would begin to open up a bit more to the actor.
“So at the beginning, she didn’t talk to me at all,” Teller told The Daily Telegraph Australia (via Digital Spy.) “Then as we did our first scene, then she talked to me a little more and then by the end of it we would talk in between.”
It was later revealed that Kidman didn’t talk to Teller for the sake of their performances.
“Nicole had an idea that she wanted us to develop a kind of relationship as our characters did,” Teller said.
After it was all said and done, Kidman apologized to her co-star for her distant behavior.
“She said, ‘Oh Miles, you did such a wonderful job and I am sorry I had to do that to you, especially seeing as it was your first movie, but I thought it was important to go through that on camera,’” he recalled.
There were no hard feelings on Teller’s part, either, who noted that the two bonded after the movie.
“So really it was just an organic evolution of conversation, and getting to know someone,” he shared. “But by the end of it at the wrap party, we were bowling together and laughing and talking about all these things. She’s absolutely different.”
Nicole Kidman stayed in characer for several months in ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’
Rabbit Hole wasn’t the only time Nicole Kidman practiced method acting. In an interview with Deadline, the Batman Forever star revealed she once stayed in character for months shooting Nine Perfect Strangers.
“I wanted a very calm healing energy to emanate all the time so I remember going over to people and sort of putting my hand on their heart, holding their hand, they would talk to me or use my name Nicole when I would completely ignore them,” she said.
Just recently, Kidman opened up to DuJour how she took up smoking to nail her part in Being the Ricardos. Kidman stars as late actor Lucille Ball in the Amazin Prime project, and once again used her method acting to find Lucille’s voice. A search, Kidman admitted, came with some difficulty.
“At first, I said to Tom Jones, my dialogue coach, ‘This is impossible. I’m Australian. How am I going to get this?’ He said, ‘We’re going to get there,’” Kidman recalled.
According to the actor, they wanted Lucy to have a “deep smoker’s voice, so I started smoking. If I warm up for a minute, I now can do her voice standing on my head.”
