Nicole Kidman is Calm & Collected For WSJ Magazine

Nicole Kidman covers WSJ. Magazine‘s May issue photographed by Bibi Cornejo Borthwick and styled by Elin Svahn.

See excerpts from her chat with the publication.

On her husband: 

Urban, she says, is her “mellow muso,” using Australian slang for musician—the one guy she’d call in any crisis. “He’s pretty much the flip side of neurotic.” After a chance meeting at an industry event, she says she fell for him when he took her for a ride on his Harley-Davidson to Woodstock, New York, topped off with a picnic in the woods. “I was a goner—I mean, c’mon.”

On choosing her projects: “My taste is really out there. There’s no sense. I’m a complete random nonconformist,” she says. “People are like, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ I’ll very much go on the record saying I have no idea what I’m doing.”

On the psychological toll her work takes: “Certain things penetrate psychologically in a really deep way. There is just no getting around that, and I wish there was,” she says. “I haven’t been taught it. I have tried to learn it. I don’t have the ability. It does take a toll on my health, and it takes a toll on my spirit,” says Kidman, who copes by writing down her experiences and practicing meditation, taught to her by her psychologist father. “I’m always trying to dig in. The unfortunate part of it is that the feelings are intense. I wish I could be the kind of person that’s like, eh,” she says, shrugging. “I have an unbelievably understanding husband and children—the little ones who are going like, ‘Why are you looking like that, Mummy?’ [But] their ability to understand artistically is very deep already.”

On keeping her relationship and family tight: “I’ll pass on films,” says Kidman, who frequently selects projects in which she has a supporting role or that shoot on the East Coast during months when her younger daughters’ school is not in session. “We have a system worked out to keep the family together,” she says. “When Keith’s not touring, it’s much easier. He’ll be on tour next year, and then I just don’t work as much. Literally—it will become imbalanced, and we will change it. We don’t have the answers, but the one thing we do know is that we will not jeopardize us.”

Sometimes, this means bringing her girls to the set with her. Both had small parts in The Angry Birds Movie 2 and were extras in Big Little Lies. “They are kind of unusual in that they watch the filming, they are in the films. They have a great work ethic,” she says.

What would she say if one of her daughters wanted to be an actor? “I’d get out of their way,” she says.

On showing up for those who have shown up for her: “I had no idea, when things have gone down, the people who have shown up for me. And you are down on your knees, you are like, ‘I’m so vulnerable and so lost right now, and I’m unbelievably grateful for what you have done; you have no idea what you have just done,’” she says. “And by gosh, I’m going to do that—if it’s not for you, it’s for somebody else. Because I know what it means.

On being accountable for her choices: “I try not to analyze things until the end,” Kidman says. “I’ll be on my deathbed going, What? Or my kids will be accountable: What were those choices your mother made?”

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