cover story - NICOLE KIDMAN

Lock up Your Children

Hand-picked to play the wicked, manipulative, child-stealing Mrs. Coulter in the season’s big fantasy film The Golden Compass, Nicole Kidman chose to be flattered

Five years ago, when Philip Pullman granted New Line Cinema the rights to His Dark Materials, the English writer’s trilogy of fantasy novels, he offered several suggestions about whom he would like to see play the story’s main characters.

Nicole Kidman topped the list for Mrs. Coulter, a powerful and political woman with an otherworldly beauty, but also a dark and devious nature. “Even now, I still feel very privileged and very excited when someone creates something for me in mind or if they believe I am the right person to bring a character they created to life,” says Kidman in a recent L.A. interview. “It was a perfect fit, as far as I was concerned. I was always anxious to play this role, and be a part of a film of this magnitude.”

Magnitude indeed.

The first of the trilogy’s three potential films, The Golden Compass, hits theatres this month, and looks to be this year’s successor to fantasy franchises like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. (Ian McKellen, the Rings trilogy’s Gandalf even has a role, providing the voice of an heroic talking bear.)

The story revolves around 12-year-old Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards), a precocious and willful orphan who was sent by her stern uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), to live with the scholars at Jordan College. The college is located in Oxford, although not our Oxford. Lyra lives in a parallel universe to ours, where the names of places and things are similar, but usually with a twist.

In Lyra’s world, every human is always accompanied by a physical manifestation of his or her soul in animal form, known as a daemon. Like all children’s daemons, Lyra’s daemon, Pantalaimon, can change forms — from a cat to a bird to a mouse in the blink of an eye.

One day Lyra overhears Lord Asriel, who’s just back from an expedition to the far north, telling some of Jordan’s scholars about other worlds and a strange substance called “Dust.” At around the same time, children are disappearing from around Jordan College and the rumour is they’ve been stolen by a nefarious group called the Gobblers. When Lyra’s best friend Roger goes missing, she wants to find him.

But before Lyra leaves, the school’s Master (Jack Shepherd) introduces her to the exciting and seemingly compassionate Mrs. Coulter (Kidman). Feeling as if she has found a kindred spirit, Lyra decides to live with Mrs. Coulter until she can go in search of Roger. The Master also gives Lyra (who has a habit of making up stories to get herself out of trouble) an odd instrument called an alethiometer, which looks a lot like a compass, but gauges the truth.

“They were always unusual and dark, and I don’t know what makes a child think like that,” continues Kidman. “I used to keep a journal and I read back on it now, and I go, ‘That was my mind at nine years old? Why was I thinking like that?’”

Kidman says it may have been her parents, “who were kind of liberal and unusual in their thinking,” that made her such an offbeat child, or perhaps she was just born that way. “But I always remember these fantastic and imaginative things existing in my head,” she says. “I guess that’s why I became an actress, so I could live out some of those fantasies.”

It was the lavish and complicated fantasy elements of The Golden Compass that nearly scared director Chris Weitz (About a Boy, In Good Company) away. Although Weitz signed onto the project in 2004, after taking a trip to New Zealand to watch director Peter Jackson film The Return of the King, he got cold feet. By the end of that year he’d quit the project, saying that the enormous technical challenges might be too much for him.

British director Anand Tucker (Shopgirl) took over the job, but less than nine months later he resigned citing creative disagreements with the studio. And there were other problems, too. In Pullman’s books, organized religion is depicted as destructive and controlling. Accordingly, there were fears the Catholic Church would boycott. There was a brief moment when it seemed as if the $150-million production would be shelved.

But Weitz recommitted himself to the project, promising to dilute any references to the Church. Miraculously, by June of 2006, filming began in London.

Although Kidman is a devout Catholic (not a Scientologist like her ex-husband Tom Cruise, as many believe), she says Catholics shouldn’t worry about any anti-religious rhetoric. “The Catholic Church is part of my essence,” she said during a press conference at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “I wouldn’t be able to do this film if I thought it were at all anti-Catholic.”

Back in L.A. Kidman insists The Golden Compass — at least, the way it’s been adapted for the screen — is simply an exciting adventure.

“It’s not evil or blasphemous,” she says. “It’s not about shocking people or preaching any particular belief. It’s very philosophical and deep, but it’s also really entertaining.”

The last couple of years have been busy ones for Kidman, personally and professionally. In addition to The Golden Compass, she’s done the indie films Margot at the Wedding and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, the thriller The Invasion (also with Daniel Craig), and she recently wrapped filming on the period piece Australia with her pal Aussie director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!) and fellow Australian Hugh Jackman.

Plus, of course, she got married for the second time in June 2006, to country singer Keith Urban. After their short honeymoon in Tahiti, Urban spent the next three months in rehab, a trial that Kidman says only brought them closer together.

“When we got married I just wanted to be with a person that I really loved and who loved me,” she says. “Marriage isn’t about perfection…. I’m nowhere near perfect, and I’m not trying to be. The thing that I find most attractive in people are their flaws…. You know, the things that some people might think are appalling, you think are really cute?”

When she’s not working, Kidman alternates between spending time on the road with Urban, at their apartment in Sydney or their new home outside of Nashville.

Whenever possible, she also loves to cook. “It’s so relaxing,” she says with a big smile. “I don’t see it as work at all. But I would like to get better at cooking. I’d love to whip up a full-course meal in an hour or two.”

There’s one more domestic task at which Kidman excels, and it happens to be one that will come in very handy this month. “The only other domestic thing I can do,” she says, “is wrap Christmas presents really well.”

Earl Dittman is a Houston-based entertainment writer.

Finding Lyra

Adult stars Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig may headline The Golden Compass but it’s a 12-year-old British girl by the name of Dakota Blue Richards who carries the burden of the film on her narrow shoulders.

The Brighton native was chosen from a reported 10,000 young actors who auditioned for the film’s lead role of Lyra Belacqua, the brave child who embarks on a dangerous quest to save her missing friend.

Richards, an acting novice, was allowed to attend the open casting call under one condition set by her mother — that she wouldn’t be upset when she wasn’t picked.

The feisty girl made a strong impression on director Chris Weitz, and when he sent a DVD to His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman containing the auditions of his top 40 candidates, Pullman singled out Richards and one other girl as his favourites.

The young actor had seen the National Theatre’s stage version of The Golden Compass when she was 10, and told her mother she wanted to be Lyra. She got her wish, but as Weitz told Newsweek magazine last year, that wish may come with a price. “I don’t know if anyone can prepare Dakota for the kind of exposure that’s going to come with this. Especially in England, where the press can be merciless.”

—Ingrid Randoja