Nine Perfect Strangers star Nicole Kidman reveals what drew her to the project

It is hard to resist a character that has been written precisely for you. Even harder when the last time you stepped into this author’s fictitious world, you walked away with an Emmy. But to snap up the rights to a book before you’d read a page? Even Nicole Kidman admits that decision was a bit of a gamble, though it no doubt helped that the author was Liane Moriarty, whose Big Little Lies proved such a winner for them both. “When I spoke to Liane, she told me she was writing a book and that she was writing the role of Masha for me,” Kidman explains. “She told me she thought I should play the role if I ever optioned the book and made it into a series...and that is how it started. “From there, I bought the book sight unseen. It was crazy finally reading it, knowing I had spent all this money on it, but I so believe in her.” Set in Tranquillum House, a boutique health-and-wellness resort that promises healing and transformation, Nine Perfect Strangers follows a group of people desperate to find a better way of living. Watching over the 10-day retreat is the resort’s director, Masha, a Russian-American on a mission to reinvigorate tired minds and bodies. The star-studded roster includes Melissa McCarthy, Luke Evans, Bobby Cannavale, Regina Hall and Michael Shannon, and Australians including Asher Keddie and Samara Weaving. “There are so many different characters here and it covers so many different places of trauma but also the desire to experience something new and to change,” Kidman says. When Moriarty was first talking to her about Nine Perfect Strangers, Kidman was also struck by the novel’s underlying premise. “As soon as Liane told me the catchphrase of the book, which was — ‘If you could check in and change yourself and change yourself in 10 days, would you do it?’ — that to me was an incredible question.” Working alongside Kidman to secure the rights to the book was Australian film producer Bruna Papandrea, who has helped bring bestselling novels to the screen for the past decade. The voracious bibliophile has had a hand in film adaptations of Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir Wild, Gillian Flynn’s page-turning Gone Girl, and Jane Harper’s debut novel The Dry. Having worked alongside Reese Witherspoon at their production company, Pacific Standard, Papandrea branched out in 2017 and established Made Up Stories alongside her husband, producer Steve Hutensky, and another producer, Jodi Matterson. With Moriarty giving the green light once again to set her story in California instead of Australia (as she did with Big Little Lies), plans were well under way for the shoot to start last year. Until, a month out, COVID-19 hit. The production companies (which also included Kidman’s Blossom Films) had to act quickly, and soon settled on moving the series to Australia. McCarthy, however, needed a little convincing. Despite being holed up in Los Angeles with her family for months last year, when the offer came through to move to what many are proclaiming as the “New Hollywood” — Byron Bay — she didn’t jump at it right away. “No offence to Australia but we had been locked down for about five months at that point. I hadn’t left my house or been to a grocery store, so to have someone call me and ask if I wanted to go around the world with my family... I was like I haven’t been outside my front door,” she laughs. “It sounded like, ‘Do you want to go to the moon on Thursday?’ and I was like, ‘What?’” But a conversation with one of her daughters sealed the deal. “My daughter came out of her Zoom class with her eyes glazed over because she was not enjoying that process,” she recalls. “I told her I had the weirdest phone call and she looked at me completely deadpan and said, ‘Isn’t Australia, like, the safest place on the planet?’ and that we should pack and leave that night.” After settling in Byron Bay and immersing herself in the fictional retreat of Nine Perfect Strangers, McCarthy said she would be quite willing to put her body on the line to “recalibrate” after the past 18 months — though perhaps not with the unconventional methods practised at Tranquillum House. “I haven’t been to a wellness retreat, but this has made me want to go,” she says. “I know this one is a wild ride but I wouldn’t mind and would let them throw me off kilter. “The idea of some self-care, the thought of taking some moments for myself would be better for me and everyone around me.” As the shoot approached, Kidman faced a challenge of her own — she was nervous about pulling off the mixed accent. “I wanted to come from an authentic and deep place that was appealing and I may be wrong, but I hope it is not going to be jarring or off-putting to people,” she says. “But I loved doing it.” So much so that the actor struggled to shake it when working on her subsequent project, The Northman, an epic historical film set in 10th century Iceland. “The director would come up and whisper in my ear and tell me we would need to go again because you sound Russian,” she laughs. After the success of Big Little Lies, which picked up an impressive 16 Primetime Emmy Award nominations in its first season in 2017, as well as four Golden Globes, big things are expected from this adaptation (Moriarty’s next novel, Apples Never Fall, is due out next month). The producers certainly think they’re onto a winner. Matterson says much of that is down to the richness of Moriarty’s characters, male and female. “What Liane has created is this combustible setting where you have these nine strangers, all with their own issues, coming in and converging together and having Masha be a kind of conduit to all of their stuff bubbling up. It’s kind of an irresistible formula to be able to explore these characters that will have you laughing one minute and crying the next.” Nine Perfect Strangers is now streaming on Amazon Prime.