Before filming Big Little Lies, Meryl Streep learned a surprising fact about costar Nicole Kidman.
“Reese [Witherspoon] told me the very first night we were up in Monterey, before we started shooting, she said, ‘You know what she does?’” Streep, 74, recalled at the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award Gala on Saturday, April 27. “I said, ‘No, Nicole?’ She goes, ‘Yeah, you know what she does? She goes out at 5, before dawn, and she goes skinny-dipping behind the hotel in the ocean.’ I looked at Nicole and I said, ‘Are you kidding me? The Pacific is like 48 degrees in March.’ Nicole said, ‘Yeah! I love it!’”
Streep, who presented Kidman, 56, with the honor at the Los Angeles event, gushed that her pal is “a wild mongrel talent.”
“You’re like a mustang, a workhorse, and a champion racer all in one, but one whose spirit, they’ll never break. Never. The range of your work is stunning. Your list of credits and roles and good deeds in the world would take a normal person three lifetimes to achieve,” Streep said. “Your life and your resume challenges everything we know about how many hours there are in the day and how many places a woman can be at one time. It’s hard not to envy Nicole, but it’s also impossible not to be in awe of her.”
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Streep praised Kidman’s acting skill set after witnessing it during season 2 of Big Little Lies, which aired in 2019. “When an actress bares all and leaps off into the unknown, she dives deep into the darker parts of what it is to be a human being,” Streep said. “But I don’t think it’s bravery. I think it’s love. I think she just loves it. And I think that’s the greatest attribute an actor can have — that blend of appetite and curiosity and recklessness. You have that, baby.”
Streep joined the star-studded crew of Kidman, Witherspoon, 48, Shailene Woodley, Zoë Kravitz and Laura Dern after season 1 of the hit HBO series. Streep played Mary Louise White, the mother-in-law of Kidman’s Celeste and grieving parent of Perry (Alexander Skarsgård), who was murdered in the first season.
After accepting the role, Streep admitted that she didn’t even read the script. “[My agent] said, ‘There’s a part that they wrote with you in mind because they called her Mary Louise.’ … I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it,’” she explained during a New York City panel discussion in 2019. “He said, ‘Don’t you want to read it?’ I said, ‘No.’ It was the greatest thing on TV. It really was, that first season.”
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