Nicole Kidman, Hollywood’s Chameleon, Only Wants to Look Like Herself

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Nicole Kidman has received countless accolades in her decades-long career, thanks to her chameleon-like abilities on-screen. (Who can forget that prosthetic nose in The Hours?) Off-screen, though, she only wants to look and feel like herself.

“I’ve got to be able to walk a red carpet and feel comfortable,” she says, “feel like myself and feel very free. If I feel too confined, that won’t be good for anyone. That ability to feel free and normal in those really extreme situations, I’m wired for that now.”

It turns out that sense of freedom is not innate. It’s something that has come with age to Kidman, who is 59. “I started modeling at 14 and 15, and I started acting at the same time. I wanted to be an actress, but I was using the modeling to make money so that I could fund my acting,” she says. “People used to always say to me, ‘When you grow up, you’re gonna be so pretty. I was like, ‘Huh?’” The backhanded compliments did their damage. “I’d look in the mirror and I’d go, What does that mean? I wanna be pretty now. But I suppose I was a gawky kind of teenager.” Kidman, 5’10 even then, towered over her peers—“I was all arms and legs, and I didn’t have control over my body, in a way’” she says—and lamented not having pin-straight, blonde hair.

Those early tests to her confidence didn’t hamper her acting career; if anything they may have fueled it through an astonishing series of memorable roles. In 2026, she’s had another busy year (the new season of Lioness debuted this month, and the sequel to cult classic Practical Magic is slated for release in September). She also fronts a video series, The Many Sides of Radiance, a campaign for Clé de Peau Beauté, unveiled Monday, for which she has served as a spokesperson since last year. That series focuses on her acting work, her work as a producer, and her advocacy for fellow women film directors and actors.

Nicole Kidman in Clé de Peau Beauté's “The Many Sides of Radiance” campaign.Courtesy of Clé de Peau Beauté

It’s what Kidman calls “the many sides of myself.” In pursuit of those different facets, she’s not a stranger to adventure, having done an Allure cover interview last year in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. For her work on camera, she says, “I love the idea of creating a character. That’s what makeup costumes, hair, all of it—even changing the way you move, does.” Those are nuances she’s always been sensitive to. Prior to technicolor, she notes that movement coaches were de rigueur, and she’s enthused by their return. “They’re really utilizing how you can become different characters,” she says, “I have zero interest in playing myself on screen.”

Looking back, she sees those criticisms from her earlier days from a different vantage point. “I understand what they were saying, in a way,” she says of past critics. “But I feel pretty now. I just go, okay, well, this is who I am. I’m grateful to have what I have and to be able to use it. I also think because of my coloring and the way in which my face is structured, I can morph and change so easily because I don’t really have any dominant features.” She’s also found different ways to modify her beauty routine, in that vein. “I do dermaplane, which I’d never done,” she says. “I started that about a year ago, and I feel like my moisturizer goes on more easily, the serums that I use. I’d been scared of it because I thought it’s like shaving. But it just gives my skin this natural exfoliation.”

Other recent interests of Kidman’s go beyond beauty. A lover of tennis, she just finished watching Rafa, the Netflix documentary series on Rafael Nadal; reading Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, and is knee deep in The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout. “Some of those are odd recommendations,” she says recognizing the variances among her interests, “but that’s my cultural type.”