Cannes 2025| Nicole Kidman: The Portrait Of An Imperfect Feminist

At 57, Nicole Kidman has lived nearly her entire life in front of the camera. She was only 16 when she made her feature film debut in the Australian drama Bush Christmas (1983). Despite it all, she has managed to maintain a chameleonic presence in the public eye. She has built a filmography dotted with unpredictability, intrigue, and radiance. With a career spanning four decades, Kidman has refused to let Hollywood define her, zigzagging between the mainstream and the experimental, the commercial and the auteur-driven, the soft and the psychotic. And now, in 2025, she adds another laurel to her long list of accomplishments: the 10th Women in Motion Award being presented at the ongoing 78th Festival du Cannes.

Launched in 2015, the Women in Motion initiative has honoured industry trailblazers. In receiving this milestone award, Kidman joins a prestigious line-up that includes Viola Davis, Susan Sarandon, Jane Fonda, Michelle Yeoh, Donna Langley, Geena Davis, Isabelle Huppert, Patty Jenkins, Gong Li, and Salma Hayek Pinault.

For Kidman, the honour comes as recognition of her sustained commitment to changing the gender ratio behind the scenes. Since publicly pledging in 2017 to work with at least one woman director every 18 months, she has, by February 2025, collaborated with women filmmakers on 19 different occasions in either an acting or producing role. This has been a deliberate and consistent strategy Kidman has leveraged since the #MeToo movement shook Hollywood.

Some critics have argued that this move to carve out space for women’s stories by other women artists has diluted the impact of Kidman’s work, casting her in similar, repetitive roles. But it cannot be overlooked that her endeavour has been crucial in greenlighting projects that may not have seen the light of day otherwise. And nobody keeps count of tedious, monotonous projects centering male superstars in trope-y, repetitive roles, so this argument against Kidman comes dead on arrival.

From Muse to Midwife

Kidman’s first collaboration with a woman director dates back to Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady in 1996—an experience that not only shaped her artistry but planted the seeds of a lifelong allegiance. It was Campion’s gritty and underrated 2003 thriller In the Cut (originally meant to star Kidman) that marked her first producer credit, even though Meg Ryan eventually played the lead. Since then, Kidman has expanded her role from muse to midwife, helping bring films to life, particularly those led by women.

In the last decade, she’s worked with directors like Sofia Coppola (The Beguiled in 2017), Susanne Bier (The Undoing in 2020, The Perfect Couple in 2024), Karyn Kusama (Destroyer, 2018), Andrea Arnold (David E. Kelley created Big Little Lies Season 2 in 2019), and Halina Reijn (Baby Girl in 2024), while championing under-the-radar projects through her production company, Blossom Films. She is also involved with the Writer’s Lab—an initiative founded by Meryl Streep and supported by the New York Women in Film & Television—which nurtures scripts by women over 40. That’s more than advocacy. It’s infrastructural change.

Imperfect Advocacy

It should still be scrutinised how intersectional Kidman’s activism truly has been. While her support for women filmmakers is commendable and measurable, there is room for a more intentional engagement with women of colour, trans filmmakers, indigenous and other marginalised voices. Attaching actors of her calibre to a project can make or break a career—especially for emerging women filmmakers.

Of course, Kidman’s consistent, albeit imperfect, advocacy is still far more consequential than another hollow red carpet statement. Natalie Portman has rightfully spoken out about the industry’s sexism in hiring women filmmakers to helm projects. But she’s acted in just one woman-directed film out of eleven since 2018. At the 2020 Oscars, she wore a cape embroidered with overlooked women directors’ names—only to be called out for the fact that her own production company hadn’t backed a single woman-directed project at the time. In the last decade, Emma Stone, another vocal feminist, has worked with only one woman director in the film, Battle of the Sexes (2017), which was co-directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton.

In contrast, Kidman, Michelle Williams, and Kirsten Dunst have put real weight behind their politics. Williams has become Kelly Reichardt’s frequent collaborator. Dunst once shut down an entire Close Up With The Hollywood Reporter roundtable by pointing out how she had made efforts to work almost exclusively with women directors in recent years as the rest of the table rued about there not being enough women at the helm.

As Hollywood slowly contends with the nuance of inclusivity, even its most progressive champions will have to push further than the safe zone of white feminism.

Unhinged Femininity and Selective Sisterhood

Kidman could have remained forever typecast as the elegant ingénue or America’s sweetheart. Instead, she leaned into her strangeness. In fact, she has often chosen to play women on the edge—the women who are emotionally unruly, psychologically fractured, and occasionally deranged. From the masochistic heartbreak of Eyes Wide Shut (1999) to the grieving mother in her first production under Blossom Films, Rabbit Hole (2010), from her surreal turn in Roar (2022) in an episode titled “The Woman Who Ate Photographs,” to the cold, cerebral horror of Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Kidman has made a meal out of unhinged femininity.

Even her recent performances feel charged with risk. Big Little Lies (2017) became a cultural phenomenon because of its prestige cast. Kidman’s terrifyingly precise portrayal of domestic violence, one that refused to veer into victim cliché, was a pivotal point of the story. In the stage play Photograph 51, she played Rosalind Franklin with a quiet fury that underscored how women’s contributions are erased from the narrative of scientific history. Whether it’s a blockbuster or an indie, Kidman picks her parts with an eye toward emotional chaos and nuance.

Kidman is soon stepping back into the world of Practical Magic. The cult 1998 film, beloved for its witchy aesthetic, killer soundtrack, and feminist undercurrents, is getting a sequel, which is slated for release in 2026. Kidman reunites with Sandra Bullock—this time not just as co-stars, but as producers as well. Susanne Bier is slated to direct, with a script by Akiva Goldsman based on a later book in Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic series.

That Kidman is still banking on stories about powerful, eccentric women at this stage in her career speaks volumes. Of course, the nostalgia around Practical Magic makes it ripe for the picking. It taps into a cultural moment when witchcraft regularly trends on TikTok, spellwork is political, and online covens gather together to hex Trump and manifest freedom for Palestine, which has become somewhat of a moral litmus test in current times. Kidman has made no public statement about the ongoing genocide in Gaza or the mounting civilian toll on Palestinian women and children—something many of her contemporaries, from Cate Blanchett to Susan Sarandon and Mark Ruffalo, have been vocal about—despite being a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador since 2006.

Debiparna Chakraborty is a film, TV, and culture critic dissecting media at the intersection of gender, politics, and power