Nicole Kidman Shades Martin Scorsese for Lack of Women in His Movies

Nicole Kidman has a list of directors she’d love to work with, and Martin Scorsese is one of them. There’s just one problem.

Speaking to Vanity Fair in a Q&A published on Wednesday, November 13, Kidman, 57, threw some shade Scorsese’s way for his history of writing films centered entirely on male characters.

“I’ve always said I want to work with [Martin] Scorsese, if he does a film with women,” said Kidman.

Kidman didn’t elaborate further, but it’s clear what she was saying. Scorsese, 81, has come under fire in the past for a lack of female representation in his work, from Goodfellas (1990) to The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).

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The Moulin Rouge actress isn’t the only one to call out Scorsese on the issue. Her Big Little Lies costar Meryl Streep held nothing back in a 2011 interview with The Talks.

“I would like Martin Scorsese to be interested in a female character once in a while, but I don’t know if I’ll live that long,” she said. (Thirteen years later, Scorsese and Streep have yet to work together.)

In fairness to Scorsese, one of his most recent projects, Killers of the Flower Moon, featured Lily Gladstone as a female lead. Gladstone won the 2024 Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama for her portrayal of Osage Indian murders survivor Mollie Burkhart.

The legendary filmmaker has heard the lack of female leads criticism before. In 2019, on the heels of his three-hour-plus movie The Irishman, an Italian reporter asked him why his movies rarely feature women with interesting narratives.

“If the story doesn’t call for it, it’s a waste of everybody’s time,” he responded.

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Kidman, for her part, didn’t just use her Vanity Fair interview to diss Scorsese. She shouted out Kathryn Bigelow, Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Haneke as directors she would like to work with. She also elaborated on how she would love to work more with industry newcomers.

“There’s a whole slew of new up-and-coming directors — there’s so many, and I’m always open to the discovery of new people,” she said. “And I find it really exciting when you go, ‘Here’s someone that’s so experienced and has been working and working, but they’ve now really hit their stride.’”

Kidman later opened up about her history of working with female directors, particularly on the 2024 Netflix miniseries The Perfect Couple and the upcoming film Babygirl.

“I’m trying to support all of these women at all different ages, at all different stages in their careers, put my weight behind them and go, ‘I’m here and I’m at your disposal and I’m ready,’” she said of starring in projects by Susanne Bier and Halina Reijn, respectively.