It’s clear that Nicole Kidman has a deep affinity for women going through excruciating circumstances—Virginia Woolf in The Hours, domestic abuse survivor Celeste in Big Little Lies, undone Grace in The Undoing. Her Prime Video series Expats, which hits the streamer January 26, gives Kidman what may be her most harrowing role of all: Margaret, a mother of three whose youngest child mysteriously goes missing while the family is living abroad in Hong Kong.
“It’s never another day at work,” says Kidman of her proclivity for playing almost-broken women. “It’s a calling. It’s a pull. It’s intense, but it’s not a day at work.”
Based on Janice Y.K. Lee’s novel The Expatriates by, Expats was created by The Farewell’s Lulu Wang, who also directs every episode. Wang’s sweeping, expansive limited series follows Kidman’s grieving Margaret; Hillary, a successful yet unsatisfied wife played by Sarayu Blue; and cursed recent college grad Mercy, played by newcomer Ji-Young Yoo, as their lives intertwine in Hong Kong. Over the six-episode series, the three women grapple with the issues of race, class, privilege, religion and, most trenchantly, home as they navigate life away from their mother countries.
Vanity Fair sat down with Kidman and Wang at the Crosby Hotel, Kidman and Wang to chat about staying above water while tackling traumatic subject matter, lights and shadows, and the next generation of female directors.
Vanity Fair: Both of you have experiences that are expat adjacent. Nicole, you were born in Hawaii but grew up in Australia; Lulu, you were born in China and moved to the U.S. when you were a child. Did that inform how you approached the project in any way?
Lulu Wang: Definitely. It was one of the main reasons I wanted to do this series, because I saw it as an opportunity to really explore people in diaspora. Hong Kong in particular is such a vibrant intersection of people from so many different places with so many different backgrounds.
Nicole Kidman: I’d been to Singapore to visit my sister because she was living there with her husband and her kids at the time as an expat. Initially, she gave me the book because she went, “Oh, you have to read this. This is so my life.” I read it and I saw her trying to go back to see our family, my mother. I’m in America going through a similar thing, but not in the same way because I was born in the States. So there was something where I was like, “Oh, okay, this is still a part of who I am because I was born here.”
I think being an expat is primarily, you’re living somewhere temporarily. There’s a beginning or an end to it, you feel. So it’s always like, “Well, when is this going to end?” That was what was interesting to me. And then you have the relationships and then all of the family issues, because it’s primarily about family and home.
in Expats, Margaret is going through potentially the worst possible thing that could happen to a mother—not knowing what happened to her son, Gus. Nicole, how do you stay above water when tackling such heavy subject matter?
Chris Murphy
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