How Nicole Kidman became stuck as a sad wife

Does the female protagonist of your current favourite TV show seem ill at ease in her multi-million dollar home? Is there a high probability that she’s harbouring a dark secret? Does she like to stare out across the sunset/cityscape/rolling ocean waves (delete as appropriate) while pondering said secret? Is she married to a handsome man whose veneer of charm is growing more fragile with every episode? Finally – and this one’s very important – does her hair look great even as she’s subject to intense psychological distress? If you’ve answered yes to all of the above, congratulations: your show passes the Nicole Kidman test. In fact, there’s a 99 per cent chance that Kidman is already starring in it.

Over the best part of the last decade, Kidman has repeatedly gravitated towards scripts that require her to embody beautiful women in high tax brackets who are weighed down by cashmere scarves and troubled pasts. She has become prestige television’s preeminent sad wife, well versed in portraying women who are just about holding it all together (and looking ethereally beautiful while doing so). Have you recently read a psychological thriller in which a well-to-do lady is pushed to the limit by a suspicious death or a tragic disappearance? You can bet that Kidman and her production company Blossom Films have already snapped up the option rights (if not, her friend Reese Witherspoon might have got there first).

Take, for example, Kidman’s latest splashy Netflix project, The Perfect Couple, based on the hit novel by American writer Elin Hilderbrand. In it, she plays Greer Garrison Winbury, the matriarch of a WASPy all-American family and an author so staggeringly successful that she has graced the cover of TIME magazine. She doesn’t so much walk as waft through the air like a particularly refined (and expensive) perfume; she dresses exclusively in tasteful muted tones.

Her palatial waterfront home in Nantucket, off the coast of Cape Cod, is about to host her son’s wedding – until a body is washed up on the shore on the morning of the celebrations. Over the course of the police investigation that ensues, the fault lines in Greer’s life – including her seemingly fairytale marriage to Tad (Liev Schreiber) – become all too apparent. With all this drama to contend with, it’s no surprise that she needs to take time out to pensively survey the Massachusetts horizon, while sipping on liberally poured gin and tonics.

If all this sounds suspiciously familiar, that’s because there are strong similarities with Big Little Lies, the 2017 series that marked Kidman’s most important foray into the Troubled Wife TV Universe (she’d previously appeared in the film adaptation of The Stepford Wives back in 2004, and played a mother with a secret in Top of the Lake’s second season, but BLL really set the blueprint). This adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel, scripted by David E Kelley, showcased the turbulent private lives of wildly wealthy women in Grand Designs residences overlooking the coast (in this case, Monterey in California); it also happened to kick off with a murder investigation, and featured plenty of aspirational loungewear.

As Celeste, a beautiful lawyer whose life is made hell by her controlling, violent husband, Kidman helmed one of the series’ most powerful storylines, bringing nuance, depth and psychological complexity to its depiction of domestic abuse. Her performance was hailed as one of the show’s biggest strengths; she later won a well-deserved Emmy and Golden Globe for her work. But since then, Kidman has been trapped in a succession of roles that feel like increasingly diluted versions of her triumphant turn in BLL’s first season (the second instalment was hit and miss, and gave Kidman much less to do).

In 2020’s The Undoing, another Kelley series that also marked the first time Kidman worked with The Perfect Couple‘s director Susanne Bier, she played Grace, a rich New York psychologist whose life is thrown into a tailspin by the brutal murder of the young mother of one of her son’s classmates. She spent most of the series pacing the streets of Manhattan in a pre-Raphaelite curly wig and a selection of coats best described as Middle Earth chic. In 2021, she became a bonkers wellness guru in Nine Perfect Strangers, based on another of Moriarty’s novels – but behind the Russian accent and straggly blonde wig, the character was still saddled with some typical Sad Wife trauma. And then earlier this year, she starred as a poised, glacially beautiful affluent woman dealing with the fallout from the disappearance of her child in Amazon’s Hong Kong-set series Expats, which presented another variation on the same well-worn theme.

There may be slight gradations in character – The Perfect Couple’s Greer is a little spikier than the usual Sad Wife, prone to saying things like “wedding dress be damned, huh?” when she sees her future daughter-in-law (Eve Hewson) eating a bread roll. But for the most part these roles feel like a case of diminishing returns, for Kidman and for viewers. Big Little Lies managed to be both satirical and sympathetic in its characterisation; yes, the camera lingered on the gorgeous homes, but the show also had plenty of sharp insights into the protagonists’ inner lives – and inner darkness – too. From The Undoing onwards, though, these series have lacked that acuity, showing off characters’ wealth without bothering to say anything interesting about it. The relentless emphasis on opulent interiors and the intricacies of upper-class lives makes it seem that women’s stories are only notable if the protagonists are beautiful, slightly haughty and almost comically well-coiffed.

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What’s particularly puzzling is the gulf that seems to have appeared between Kidman’s film output and her TV performances. Her movie work has always been thrillingly eclectic. This is a woman, after all, who received back-to-back Best Actress Oscar nominations for two vastly divergent roles: the first for a turn as a singing, dancing fin-de-siecle showgirl stricken with consumption (in 2001’s Moulin Rouge!), the second for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf (in The Hours, for which she won the Academy Award).

More recently she’s played a terrifying Viking queen in The Northman (wearing a similarly terrifying wig), channelled comedy icon Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos and appeared as a doctor grappling with an unthinkable decision in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, arguably director Yorgos Lanthimos’ weirdest and most unsettling work yet. She has just earned some of the best reviews of her career for Babygirl, an erotic thriller produced by A24, in which she stars as a high-powered CEO mired in a psychosexual affair with a much younger intern (“I felt very exposed as an actor, as a woman, as a human being,” she recently said of the role).

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So if anyone can be relied upon to Go There on screen – prosthetic noses, bold hairpieces, wild accents, sex scenes, the lot – it’s Kidman. She’s a true chameleon and a consummate cinematic risk taker. And yet if her film work is expansive and varied, her television work has become trapped in a constricted mould. The better shows in this very specific sub-genre are enjoyable, cliffhanger-laden fluff (The Perfect Couple seems promising on this count) and the more formulaic ones just feel like a squandering of Kidman’s talent.

How did she get stuck in this niche? Perhaps she simply likes spending time in beautiful locations, wearing beautiful clothes, making beautiful but not all-that-taxing miniseries. Nice work if you can get it. But Kidman’s Sad Wife era also speaks to a fundamental issue with TV right now. One successful series prompts a slew of weaker facsimiles. Instead of thinking about all the elements that made a show a hit – in the case of Big Little Lies, these included a great cast, a clever structure, emotional depth and a spotlight on the stories of women over 40 – commissioners seem to think that a knock-off version of the same plot will suffice. We’re drowning in TV made to fit the “because you watched this, you might like that” model.

And as fun as it might be to see Kidman gliding around Nantucket in a strawberry blonde wig and gorgeous wide-legged trousers, this repetitive strategy is doing a disservice to great performers like her. Give us Nicole Kidman in space! Nicole Kidman solving crimes, like Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown. Or if we really want to break the mould, give us Nicole Kidman as a woman in a happy, secret-free marriage, who sometimes looks a bit rough in the morning.

‘The Perfect Couple’ is out now on Netflix