‘I’m holding it steady’: In the third act of her career, Nicole Kidman is digging into her grief and loss

Nicole Kidman plays Patricia Cornwell’s detective hero Dr. Impersonating Kay Scarpetta is possible with unexpected ease. It shouldn’t be a surprise by now. Inside Big Little Lies, Retrieval, expats And Perfect CoupleKidman has turned playing complex, multi-layered women on television into the third act of her career.

But Scarpetta, told across two timelines (the present featuring Kidman and the early career of Dr. Scarpetta, played by Rosy McEwen) unfolds at an unexpected intersection of Kidman’s professional and personal life.

Actress and producer Jamie Lee Curtis, who starred in the series, owned the rights to the books through her company Comet Pictures. In a chance meeting between Curtis and Kidman, they discussed the project. Later, when Kidman brought up the subject with her sister Antonia, Kidman’s younger sister revealed that she was an obsessive fan.

“When I told him about it Scarpetta Kidman said, ‘Well, you have to do this, I love those books,'” Kidman says. “Antonia loves crime novels. He finds reading detective novels very relaxing. And he has a very strong business, he has children. Interesting that this was his sanctuary. “I think Kay loved Scarpetta for the same reasons.”

The series’ showrunner, Liz Sarnoff, came to the project in a similar way. For him, his relationship with Kay Scarpetta began when his mother gave him the books.

“For me and my mom, this opened up a world of possibilities because there weren’t many female bosses of any business in the ’90s,” Sarnoff says. “And this was a woman doing it in an all-man’s world. And it was kind of an example that you can do anything you want. You can be whatever you want to be.”

“These books came out in the 1990s, my mother died in 1998, so I read some of these books to my mother when she was on her deathbed in the hospital. It was such a powerful connection. When I saw they were being made, I reached out to do it because I knew I had a love for the character and the books that would help me adapt them.”

In the series, we meet Kay Scarpetta and her sister Dorothy Farinelli (Curtis). Two women with very different personalities are connected by their shared grief over the loss of their parents. It’s a world not far from the experience of Nicole and Antonia, who lost their mother Janelle in 2024 shortly before shooting began. Scarpetta.

The series also enters a deeply personal chapter, with Kidman finalizing her divorce from singer Keith Urban in January. (The couple filed for divorce in September last year.) Although she’s not here to talk about it specifically, Kidman told me he’s fine. “I’m fine,” he says. “I’m holding it steady. That’s a good place to say it.”

According to Kay, Kidman says her grief “is described as: [the answer to the question] Why do you choose to become a coroner? I chose something different. So my whole nervous system and consciousness is very different from Kay’s, so I move; because I’m always in the process of exploring different human conditions and the ways different people behave and react. It’s emotionally fascinating to me and I love absorbing it.

“So it wasn’t [something I explored] regarding my parents, but in my well of experience there is loss, grief, pain, resilience, desire to move forward, conflict, and all of those things. I’ve been through a lot at this age and [am] “We continue to experience this as all the different aspects of being a 58-year-old woman come into play.”

Kidman and I have talked in the past about the idea of ​​a woman being reflected in a mirror; Is it the roles the woman plays, or the versions of herself that appear on movie posters or movie artwork? Obviously they are that, but at the same time they are not.

In that strange frame Scarpetta adds Rosy McEwen as young Kay. Reaction to the casting has been almost universally positive. Not just because of the way McEwen captures the character, but also because of her interesting evocation of Kidman.

“I’m so grateful that she’s so talented because she came in and is very, very permeable,” Kidman said. “I didn’t know what he was doing, but he was working. And as I was building Kay, he was watching how I was building Kay, and he was building his Kay. And we were transitioning. [but] It happened in a very sincere way.

“Sometimes I would watch, she would watch my diaries, I would watch her diaries, which was helpful. We had a dialect coach that we shared who was also very, very good with movement and ideas. There are always so many people involved in the performances and the creation of any material… It’s the soup, as Jamie puts it, and everyone contributes to the soup.”

And in the middle of all this, an unexpected woman enters the frame: Patricia Cornwell, the author of the book series and who filmed a cameo in the series. By all accounts, this was a very impressive encounter for Cornwell. At an event in New York ahead of the series’ premiere, he talked about his excitement and excitement at coming face to face with the woman who now brings his literary hero to life.

For Kidman, it was “scary and overwhelming,” she says. “At the same time, it was a very, very generous act of him, number one, to come and do this for us, and number two, to hand me the baton and say, ‘you’ve got this, I believe in you, and you’re Kay’.”

In a moment that curiously recalls the encounter between actress Lynda Carter and Gal Gadot that involved the passing of Wonder Woman’s wand, Kidman says Cornwell gifted her with the heart and soul of the character.

“He took me aside and said, ‘She’s yours now, and from this point on, when I write to her, all I see is you,'” Kidman says. “Well, it’s like: oh, thank you. And this is a generous woman who offers her knowledge, her wisdom, and her creation to you. That’s what we’re all about. When you talk about sisterhood, that’s what you’re really talking about: support, care, and then freedom.”

Scarpetta It will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on March 11.

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