How Nicole Kidman Learned to Love Playing Lucille Ball
The New York Times
A career of dramas like “The Hours” and “Big Little Lies” was not enough to help Kidman portray the “I Love Lucy” star in “Being the Ricardos.” As she put it, “Funny’s hard.”
There are valuable lessons Nicole Kidman has learned each time she plays a real-life figure: How that person was misapprehended by society at the time. How that era of history is more like the present day than she realized. And, crucially, how to maintain her balance while traipsing barefoot through a vat of grapes.
Recounting her preparations to play Lucille Ball, the star of “I Love Lucy,” Kidman suggested that her methodical efforts to learn Ball’s enduring 1956 grape-stomping routine were not fully sufficient when it came time to re-enact it on camera.
“I had only practiced on a floor,” Kidman said with a gentle earnestness. “The one thing I didn’t count on was that there were going to be real grapes. They’re actually really slippery, just so you know.”
