Nicole Kidman takes on the role of gender groundbreaking real-life war correspondent Martha Gellhorn in the upcoming HBO film “Hemingway and Gellhorn,” but she has no interest in ever having a movie made about her own life.
“No, please no,” she said on Friday during HBO’s portion of the Television Critics Association Winter Session, when asked how she’d feel about having her own life chronicled by a film in 50 years’ time.
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Kidman said she prefers to keep her life private so she can get into character better.
“Part of the reason of being an actor is you like playing other people’s lives and exploring all the psychologies in that and the emotions,” the actress, who stars opposite Clive Owen (Ernest Hemingway) in the historically based film about the famed writers’ relationship, added. “I think having my life be as private and quiet as possible is a way in which then I can go and play characters. I like the privacy of my life and I protect it quite vigilantly.”
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In “Hemingway and Gellhorn,” which premieres in May on HBO, Owen said taking on the bigger than life personalities of two people, whose relationship spanned the 30s and 40s, and crossed through various global conflicts and wars, was an immense task.
“When I took this on, it was a huge challenge,” Owen said, noting he took off a lot of time before shooting began to “immerse” himself into preparing to play the iconic writer, whose works included “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Old Man and the Sea.”
Kidman said she was able to dig into the meat of Gellhorn as a true “trailblazer.”
“She was the first female, really, war correspondent ... and she wrote with such direct truth ... and that is so hard to do," Kidman said. “She’s not Hemingway, she doesn’t want to write novels, she wants to be a correspondent and I love that she was the first woman to do that ... She was a trailblazer.”
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