Nicole Kidman is keeping up with the hustle over the weekend, going straight from her celebration at The Dolby Theater to an FYC Event the very next day.
The actress, 56, attended Amazon Prime’s FYC panel on Sunday, April 28 for her show Expats at nya WEST in LA, just one day after her lavish American Film Institute Gala on Saturday, where she and husband Keith Urban made their red carpet debut with their teenage daughters, Sunday, 15, and Faith, 13.
She joined series creator Lulu Wang and her co-stars on discussions surrounding the themes influencing the series, the production, and borrowing inspirations from their own personal lives. Watch the trailer for Expats below…
In a departure from her dazzling gold Balenciaga gown from the AFI Gala, she wore a black sheer dress with a slip underneath, featuring a white preppy collar and cuffed sleeves, plus gold buttons. Her hair was also styled in a top-knot, opting for a more professional look after her beachy waves for Saturday night’s event.
In one instance, Nicole spoke about a scene in which her character Margaret is asked to identify a child’s body in the morgue, and she recalled how she reacted to seeing her late father Anthony’s body.
“When we go to the morgue when we’re told our son is there… I just said, ‘I’m gonna try something because this is actually from my own life’ – not where I went to a morgue, but when my father passed away, and I laughed,” she mentioned at the panel.
“Because it was so devastating when I saw his body… and I had the most awful reaction, which was I started to shake and laugh. And I’m like, ‘That’s what Margaret would be feeling.'”
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She remembered her mother Janelle’s shock upon seeing her reaction and trying to slap her and get her to “snap out of it” because she felt so “short-circuited” in her moment of grief.
While she felt ashamed at first talking about, Nicole explained that she came to realize that the response was “real” and informed by abject grief, and decided to borrow from it for the scene, which received positive responses.
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“So many people have come up to me subsequently and gone, ‘Yeah, I’ve had it,’ where you start to shake and instead of tears rolling, you are quivering with this weird laughter. It’s awful. Awful,” the Oscar-winning star shared.
The Days of Thunder actress shared the same anecdote in a previous interview with Elle, saying that Margaret’s reaction of laughter comes from the same place of just being unable to “handle it.”
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“I literally started laughing because I was so grief-stricken and so devastated,” she said of seeing her father’s body in his coffin. “My body and my psyche just couldn’t handle it.”
“Even at other times in my life, I’ve laughed at inappropriate times because I have this weird short-circuiting. It’s like you need this moment to keep you alive, in a way, otherwise you’ll die. It’s too much pain.”
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