Nicole Kidman captivated TV viewers in 2020 in “The Undoing,” as a girl whose husband was accused of homicide. In “Big Little Lies,” she was a girl in an abusive marriage. And let’s not neglect she received an Oscar for enjoying twentieth century author Virginia Woolf, who battled psychological sickness, within the 2002 film “The Hours.”
In her new sequence “Expats,” premiering Friday on Amazon Prime Video, Kidman as soon as once more emotionally jumps off a cliff. At the middle of “Expats” are three girls, performed by Kidman, Ji-young Yoo and Sarayu Blue, who’re every expatriates residing in Hong Kong. Their lives are all altered when the younger son of Kidman’s character, Margaret, goes lacking.
Lulu Wang ( “The Farewell” ) directed and was the showrunner of the six-episode sequence, filmed on location in Hong Kong.
“When Nicole came to me, to make the series, I just felt like she was meeting me at the height of the success of ‘The Farewell.’ But people who know me from childhood know we were immigrants (from China),” Wang says. “I felt like the series had to represent that aspect of my life, like, yes, I’m an American expat in certain contexts, but in another context, I’m a Chinese immigrant. I wanted to really challenge this idea of a bubble that expats have.”
An concept that Wang had was to make the fifth episode some 90 minutes and deal with the home staff, expats themselves and tasked with protecting different girls’s households working.
“Imagine you’ve just met Nicole Kidman and you’re like, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea for an episode and you’re in the background. What do you think about it?’” Wang laughs.
An govt producer, Kidman wasn’t simply receptive to Wang’s ideas and concepts — they spoke to a real profession ardour, championing others.
“What I want to do at this point in my life and career is support women like this and support the new visionaries and auteurs that are coming up and try to create paths for them,” Kidman says.
“I had never worked with a writer’s room before,” Wang says. “It’s a very sort of solitary task to write usually. Here it was a room of women, helping to develop the story.”
One of these writers on the present was Janice Y. Ok. Lee, whose novel “The Expatriates” impressed the sequence.
“She was so not precious about the book. And the reason, honestly, I wanted her in the room was so that we couldn’t mess things up and so that she would be involved in the process,” Wang explains. “You can’t get higher analysis than having the one who skilled it and wrote it within the room. … We would at all times reference the guide and quote it again to her, and he or she was at all times fairly embarrassed.”
In addition to the ladies in entrance of and behind the digital camera, Kidman is completely satisfied to share her highlight with Brian Tee, who performs her husband.
“I’m so happy he’s gotten the chance to do this and to act opposite him,” she says, including that, as on-screen spouses, they have been bonded by trauma.
“We really helped each other. We were very much each other’s best friend and support system. And because we’re playing a married couple whose child is missing, we’re doing that together,” she says.
To go to these emotional locations as Margaret “was harrowing at times,” admits Kidman, who says she needed to lose herself within the second. “It’s an exploration. … It’s like, put me in the place, put me in the scene, and let’s go off to the objective and whatever comes through will come through.”
Associated Press journalist John Carucci contributed to this story from New York.
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