When Nicole Kidman gets angry, she really shows it.
I mean, like really really...
In the Oscar winner's new movie, Rabbit Hole, she and Aaron Eckhart play a married couple grieving the tragic death of their young son.
To say the film, one of this awards season's big favorites, is really intense is an understatement. In the most memorable--and most heart-wrenching--scene, Kidman and Eckhart's characters rage at each other like...well, you'd have to be the coldest of cold hearts not to tear up.
"When Nicole did that explosion, she was doing more recessive takes that were more calmer and like, 'You can't rile me up,'" Rabbit Hole director John Cameron Mitchell told me the other day at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. "I said, 'Nicole, you've got to go further. He is being unreasonable. You cannot be impregnable anymore because he's gone too far.
"And then she did that take and she turned purple because she's so pale," he said. "It was scary...And I knew that was the take. Some people thought it might have been too much and we should keep her controlled and I was like, No! She's pushed to that brink.'"
It wasn't always like that on set--especially the day they shot at a Bed Bath &Beyond. "She's very funny," Mitchell said. No matter how successful she and her husband are, when we were shooting there, she was like, 'A 30 percent discount!' So she's running around like grabbing things and going, 'This juicer is so reasonable.' She knows a good bargain."
WATCH: Is Nicole Kidman a diva? Find out in Marc's videoblog