Nicole Kidman’s last collaboration with HBO earned her great ratings, critical acclaim, and two Emmy Awards. It’s no wonder that the “Big Little Lies” star and exec producer is heading back to the premium cable network with her next TV project. The Oscar winner will topline and exec produce an adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2014 novel “You Should Have Known,” Variety reports.
Titled “The Undoing,” the miniseries will see Kidman re-teaming with “Big Little Lies” writer David E. Kelly, who will exec produce, write, and serve as showrunner. “Big Little Lies” exec producer Bruna Papandrea will take on the same role for “The Undoing” through her company Made Up Stories. The miniseries doesn’t have a director yet, but it’s received a straight-to-series order from HBO.
Described as “living the only life she ever wanted for herself,” Kidman’s character, Grace Sachs, is a successful therapist who is just about to publish her first book. She has a “devoted husband and young son who attends an elite private school in New York City, [but] weeks before her book is published, a chasm opens in her life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only a chain of terrible revelations,” the source summarizes. “Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.”
“David has created another propulsive series with a fascinating, complicated female role at its center,” said Kidman. “I’m excited and honored to continue collaborating with HBO and David E. Kelley.”
Kidman is set to reprise her role as Celeste in Season 2 of “Big Little Lies.” Season 1 of the show was based on Liane Moriarty’s best-selling novel. Every ep of the upcoming season will be directed by Andrea Arnold. It was just announced that her co-star Reese Witherspoon has an eight-episode drama on the way with Hulu. Also an adaptation of a woman-penned book, “Little Fires Everywhere” co-stars “Scandal’s” Kerry Washington.
A four-time Oscar nominee, Kidman won in 2003 for “The Hours.” Her upcoming projects include Rebecca Miller’s “She Came to Me,” a dramedy about intertwining love stories co-starring Amy Schumer, and Karyn Kusama’s “Destroyer,” a crime drama about a detective.
Last year Kidman announced her pledge to work with a woman director every 18 months. “I need to be part of the movement that will, hopefully, change the statistics in my field,” she said. “Because, to be an advocate, you have to actually put things into action.”
