Reese Witherspoon Asked Nicole Kidman What Role She'd Love To Return To, And Her Answer Was Not What I Would Have Guessed At All

Nicole Kidman looks terrified in The Others.
(Image credit: Warner Bros., StudioCanal, Dimension Films, FilmFlex, Lucky Red)

Nicole Kidman has had an incredible career in Hollywood. She’s made massive blockbuster movies and won awards almost too numerous to count. She's also become a regular Oscar nominee and could be again, with her recent movie Babygirl being considered for acting awards five times and winning once. She’s done almost all there is to do in the movie, business, except the thing almost everybody else has done, make a bunch of sequels.

In her nearly 100 acting credits Nicole Kidman has only been in one sequel, having played Atlanna, the mother to DC superhero Aquaman, in both the first Aquaman film and its sequel, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. However, there is a perhaps surprising role she’d like to revisit. When asked by former co-star Reese Witherspoon in a piece for The Guardian if there is a role she’d like to return to, she picked her character Grace from 2001 horror movie The Others. Kidman said…

Actually the character I would love to go back to is the character in The Others, Grace. Because I feel like The Others gets overlooked and I loved that character.

I would have expected to hear Nicole Kidman mention something like her Osca- nominated role in Moulin Rouge or another more crowd-pleasing choice as a character she’d like to revisit. Of course, one of Kidman’s most crowd-pleasing roles as a witch in Practical Magic does have a sequel in development.

The Others is a surprising choice, if only for the reason Kidman herself states, that it often gets overlooked. In the film, Kidman plays the mother of two young children living in an old house in 1945. The children are sensitive to light, and thus the three are confined to a dark house, where supernatural elements are taking place around them and terrifying them all.

The movie is quite good (it's honestly one of Nicole Kidman's best movies) in a genre that she rarely enters into. The Others was generally well received by critics, but wasn’t a massive box office hit. The biggest knock against it at the time was that it was released two years almost to the day after The Sixth Sense. Also, considering The Others has a twist ending of its own (that I won’t spoil here) it was seen by some as a knock off, which was unfair, as the movie is quite good in its own right.

While The Others certainly doesn’t need a sequel, the story itself doesn’t close off that possibility. Perhaps some enterprising screenwriter will see this is a character that Nicole Kidman would like to play again and put together an idea. If you’ve never seen The Others, or would like to watch it again, it can be streamed with a Shudder subscription.

Dirk Libbey
Content Producer/Theme Park Beat

CinemaBlend’s resident theme park junkie and amateur Disney historian, Dirk began writing for CinemaBlend as a freelancer in 2015 before joining the site full-time in 2018. He has previously held positions as a Staff Writer and Games Editor, but has more recently transformed his true passion into his job as the head of the site's Theme Park section. He has previously done freelance work for various gaming and technology sites. Prior to starting his second career as a writer he worked for 12 years in sales for various companies within the consumer electronics industry. He has a degree in political science from the University of California, Davis.  Is an armchair Imagineer, Epcot Stan, Future Club 33 Member.