5 Books That Became Iconic Nicole Kidman Movies & TV Shows

Books keep Nicole Kidman company in the small hours. "I do read before I go to sleep a lot of times. It's a really good way for me to wind down," she shared on the Books, Beach, & Beyond podcast. "Then, if I wake up at 3am, I am one of those people that has a reading light and pops it on." It's easy to picture her slipping between worlds. She has, after all, made a life of doing just that.

It follows, then, that many of Kidman's most indelible performances have come not from the ether, but directly from literature. She is drawn to the ambiguous, the interior, the unresolved — to characters who are beautifully unraveled. "I'm interested in people who are trying to find their way through life," she once said. "I find the exploration of that endlessly fascinating."

Over the years, Kidman has assembled a filmography that doubles as a reading list — a library of literary heroines come to life. To each, Kidman brings a certain reverence, as if she has absorbed their stories, word by word, in the half-light. Her roles always possess an intimacy that suggests she's lived with their voices in her head for some time. And, as a reader, perhaps she has.

Many people came to "Big Little Lies" as the hit HBO show we know and love — the one that swept up countless nominations and awards, and cemented Nicole Kidman's status as a master of complex roles. But before that, it was a novel. With its sea-swept Californian backdrop and biting dialogue, Liane Moriarty's book was a sharp, absorbing take on the brutal interiority of women's lives, hiding heartbreak amongst wealth and routine.

When Kidman read the novel, it placed on her radar a character with the emotional complexity she's so often drawn to — the type that makes her favorite books an emotional reading list. She took on the role of Celeste Wright, a former lawyer, wife, and mother whose outward elegance conceals a deeply abusive marriage. Celeste is not passive; she's intelligent, capable, and often defiant. But her marriage to Perry, played by the ever-magnetic Alexander Skarsgård, traps her in a cycle of violence that she can't quite admit to herself.

When Celeste begins to understand the impact of the abuse, especially after discovering her son is mimicking his father's aggression, her slow shift toward clarity is played with restraint and rawness. Kidman moves through denial, shame, and fear with masterful subtlety. The performance earned Kidman awards and critical acclaim, and swiftly became regarded as one of her best to date.

Before "Babygirl" revived interest in Nicole Kidman's flair for playing steely women with opaque motives, there was "To Die For." Gus Van Sant's 1995 film, adapted from Joyce Maynard's original novel, cast Kidman as Suzanne Stone — a local weather reporter with big dreams and a deep disdain for the ordinary. Her hair is perfectly lacquered, her outfits dialed to pastel perfection, and her ambition calibrated just high enough to kill for. 

Set in the New Hampshire town of Little Hope (an implausibly telling name, as it transpires), we follow Suzanne's increasingly sinister arc. When her husband Larry begins to seem more like a burden than a partner, Suzanne sinks from chipper TV personality to calculating manipulator. She enlists a trio of teenagers — one of them hopelessly infatuated with her — to help remove him from the picture. 

Maynard's novel anticipated the media landscape that was to come — one in which true crime and televised grief would become mainstream entertainment for mass consumption. In that context, Kidman's performance feels startlingly prescient. It's no surprise that her "Big Little Lies" co-star Reese Witherspoon, whose own book club is known for curating female-centered thrillers and mystery picks, called it her favorite Kidman performance, praising her portrait of someone "fascinating and calculating and shrewd, but lacking awareness" (via Vanity Fair). 

If you don't know where to start with Elin Hilderbrand books, "The Perfect Couple" is a good place to dip your toes in. The romance writer already built a cult following when Nicole Kidman was cast in the Netflix adaptation of her 2018 novel. But it was the release of the show that sent this particular work surging back into public view. Book sales surged by more than 400%, audiobook downloads dominated the suspense charts, and print copies jumped 250%, landing the novel back on The New York Times bestseller list six years after its original launch.

Set on Nantucket during the lead-up to a lavish wedding, the story sees a drowned body and a family in disarray. Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, the bridegroom's poised and exacting mother, whose public image doesn't quite align with the private tension under her roof.

Although the series ties up the murder plot by the end of its six episodes, Kidman suggested there was still more to explore. "I think it's ripe," Kidman told USA Today when asked about a second season. Fans didn't have to wait for long: in March 2025, a follow-up was officially confirmed. It seems the salt-washed façades of Nantucket's elite still have secrets left to give.

In the age of second-wave feminism and its growing cultural backlash, "The Stepford Wives" held up a mirror. What it reflected wasn't pretty. Ira Levin's 1972 novel asks: What would happen if men could have the perfect wife? What do men want from women, really? The story captured the simmering dread hiding behind the smiles of suburban Connecticut. In a world shaped by Betty Friedan and the stirrings of liberation, Levin reimagined the American dream as something disturbingly pristine — drained of agency, and polished to a disturbing, soulless shine.

Nicole Kidman stepped into the role of Joanna Eberhart in the 2004 remake, which arrived nearly three decades after the original 1975 adaptation, which played the source material as domestic horror with a straight face. Kidman's version, directed by Frank Oz, opted for satire with a camp, glossy, hallucinatory sheen. Kidman's Joanna — caught mid-era in her hair transformation —  begins as a cable television executive, all sharp instincts and sleepless ambition, until she's forcibly rerouted into suburban docility. The remake divided critics, but in retrospect, it feels oddly in step with the cultural moment to come, where the performance of femininity became both aspiration and weapon.

Nicole Kidman joined forces with Zac Efron and Matthew McConaughey for "The Paperboy" — a Southern noir so lurid it felt like a pulp fever dream. Set in a sticky, strange 1960s Florida, the plot nominally concerns two journalists chasing the story of a man on death row. But the narrative is mostly beside the point. The real engine is the heat and the half-formed desires hanging in the air. Kidman plays Charlotte Bless, a death row devotee who's convinced she's found true love through prison mail. Her Southern siren performance is deliberately unstable.

The film itself was divisive (it was famously booed at its first Cannes press screening), but the novel it was based on received far more critical acclaim. Pete Dexter's "The Paperboy," published in 1995, won the PEN Center USA Award for fiction. The book sits more squarely in the tradition of American noir than its operatic adaptation ever tried to. Still, both versions are drawn to the same uneasy border between justice and obsession.