‘I’m holding it steady’: In the third act of her career, Nicole Kidman is digging into her grief and loss

There is an unexpected ease with which Nicole Kidman steps into the skin of Patricia Cornwell’s crime heroine Dr Kay Scarpetta. It should come as no surprise by now. In Big Little Lies, The Undoing, Expats and The Perfect Couple, Kidman has turned playing complex, multilayered women on TV into the third act of her career.

But Scarpetta, which is told in two timelines – the present, featuring Kidman, and Dr Scarpetta’s early career, where she is played by Rosy McEwen – came about in an unexpected intersection of Kidman’s professional and personal life.

Jamie Lee Curtis, the actress and producer who co-stars in the series, owned the rights to the books, via her company Comet Pictures. At a chance meeting between Curtis and Kidman they discussed the project. And then, when Kidman raised the topic with her sister Antonia, the younger Kidman sister revealed she was an obsessive fan.

“When I told her about Scarpetta she was like, ‘well, you have to do it, I love those books’,” Kidman says. “Antonia loves crime novels. She finds it very relaxing to read a crime novel. And she has a high-powered job, she has kids. For that to be her place of refuge is interesting. And she loved Kay Scarpetta, I think for the same reasons.”

The series’ showrunner Liz Sarnoff came to the project in a similar fashion. For her, the relationship with Kay Scarpetta began when her mother had passed the books on to her.

“For me and my mother it was a world of possibility that opened up because, in the ’90s, there weren’t a lot of women bosses of anything,” Sarnoff says. “And this was a woman who was doing it in a completely male world. And it sort of stood as an example of you can do anything you want. You can be what you want to be.

“These books came out in the 1990s, my mother died in 1998, so I read some of these books to my mother while she was in the hospital on her deathbed. It was a very powerful connection. When I saw they were being made, I reached out to ask to do it because I knew that I had a love for the character and a love for the books that would help me in adapting them.”

In the series we meet Kay Scarpetta and her sister, Dorothy Farinelli (Curtis). The two women, with very different personalities, are connected by their shared grief for the loss of a parent. It’s a world not too far removed from the lived experience of Nicole and Antonia, who lost their mother Janelle in 2024, shortly before filming began on Scarpetta.

The series also lands in the deeply personal wake of Kidman finalising her divorce from singer Keith Urban in January. (The couple filed for divorce in September last year.) Though we are not here to talk about that specifically, Kidman tells me she is well. “I’m good,” she says. “I’m holding it steady. That’s a good place to be able to say.”

For Kay, Kidman says, her grief “is defined by [the answer to the question] why do you choose to be a medical examiner? I chose something different. So my whole nervous system and my consciousness is very different to Kay’s, which is why I act – because I’m in the process of always exploring different human conditions and the way different people behave and respond. Emotionally it’s fascinating to me and I love absorbing it.

“So it was not [something I explored] in relation to my parents but I do have in my well of experience loss, grief, pain, resilience, the desire to move forward, conflict, all of it. I have pretty much, at this age, experienced a lot and [am] continuing to experience it, as all the different parts of being a 58-year-old woman come into play.”

In the past, Kidman and I have talked about the idea of the woman reflected back in the mirror, whether that has been roles she has played, or versions of herself that have appeared on movie posters or film artwork. They are her, obviously, but at the same time they are not.

Into that strange frame Scarpetta adds Rosy McEwen in the role of the younger Kay. Reactions to her casting have been almost universally positive. Not just because of the manner in which McEwen captures the character but in the curious way she evokes Kidman.

“I’m just so grateful that she’s so talented because she came in and she’s very, very porous,” Kidman says. “I wasn’t aware of what she was doing but she was studying. And as I was building Kay, she was watching how I was building Kay and she was building her Kay. So we were morphing [but] it happened very viscerally.

“Sometimes I’d look over and she would watch my dailies and I would watch her dailies, so that was also helpful. We had a dialect coach that we shared who also was very, very good with movement and ideas. Always, with performances and with the creation of any material, there are so many people that … as Jamie calls it, the soup, and everyone contributes to the soup.”

And in the midst of that, an unexpected woman enters the frame: Patricia Cornwell, the author of the book series, who filmed a cameo in the series. For Cornwell, by all accounts, it was an impactful encounter. At an event in New York ahead of the series premiere she spoke of her nerves and excitement at coming face to face with the woman now bringing her literary heroine to life.

For Kidman it was “intimidating and overwhelming”, she says. “And at the same time it was a very, very generous act of hers to, one, show up and do that for us, and two, to just pass the baton to me and go, ‘you’ve got this, I believe in you and you are Kay’.”

In a moment that was curiously reminiscent of the encounter between actresses Lynda Carter and Gal Gadot, which involved the baton-passing of the mantle of Wonder Woman, Kidman says Cornwell gifted her the character’s heart and soul.

“She took me aside and she just said, ‘She’s yours now, and when I write her from this point on, all I see is you’,” Kidman says. “Well, that is like, oh, thank you. And that is a generous woman offering her knowledge, her wisdom, and her creation to you. That is what we’re all about. When you talk about a sisterhood, that’s actually what you’re talking about: support, care and then freedom.”

Scarpetta premieres on March 11 on Amazon Prime Video.

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