Nicole Kidman: ‘Suddenly I was 22, 23 years old & I had this huge movie star husband’

Nicole Kidman is wonderfully eccentric. I probably missed that about her when she was younger, but as she gets older, her eccentricity is delightful. She just lives in her own little world and it’s charming. Nicole covers the September issue of British Vogue, all to promote Practical Magic 2. The sequel comes 28 years after the first film, but she and Sandra Bullock are all-in. Nicole spoke at length about Bullock, Practical Magic, her divorces, fashion and a lot more with Vogue – you can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

She’s had a secret Notting Hill flat for decades: “I’ve had it for 20 years… 21 actually. I’m stealth. I’m good at slipping in and slipping out of everywhere.”

She parties in Ibiza too: “It’s a small dinner party or it’s a rave. 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.”

She also turned up at Wimbledon during the UK heat wave: “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.”

Why she signed on to the Practical Magic sequel: “It was the fans… 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?’”

Sandra Bullock on Nicole: “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. And we have it…. Nicole and I hadn’t seen each other for decades with the exception of a run-in on a red carpet. But somehow we seamlessly stepped right back into these two sisters’ shoes like no time had passed at all.”

Feelings first: “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, 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.”

Her life has been full of cameras since her marriage to Tom Cruise: “[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…Yeah, I got married so young. 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.’”

She’s a workaholic: “I just think there are some people who are wired to work. I just am. I do have a sort of mind-over-matter thing. 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.”

[From British Vogue]

She usually doesn’t talk about her first marriage at all, or what life was like for her when she married Tom Cruise at such a young age. It really is rather amazing that she managed to stay married to Tom for years, get divorced, then she threw herself into work, won an Oscar, all by her mid-30s. As for the rest of it… I love her relationship with Bullock, and I love that Nicole is so women-centered. She sounds like she’s having a ball now that she’s divorced from Keith as well. That man was holding her back from her best self.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, cover courtesy of British Vogue.