But Have You Tried #NicoleKidmanMaxxing?

Once again, we are talking about Nicole Kidman. Which prompts the question, is there ever a time when we are not talking about Nicole Kidman? She seems to be ever present, and yet, at the same time, not quite there. Why is that? What is her secret?

To begin with, she’s a time machine. The woman is closing in on four decades in the public eye. Dial her up and she, and her extraordinary mane, will transport you all the way back to 1989’s Dead Calm (peak Nicole Kidman hair). Or you can revisit the heady days of her epic 1990s coupledom, when her relationship with Tom Cruise, her costar of Days of Thunder and Eyes Wide Shut, redefined Hollywood celebrity at the time. And there she is in 1997, changing the red-carpet game in her chartreuse Galliano Dior.

Perhaps you prefer Nicole Kidman the divorcée (round one), hands raised in triumph as she marches through a parking lot, taken around the time she signed her official divorce papers from Cruise. Nicole Kidman, herself, has debunked this rumor — apparently the shot was from a film — but its persistence in the culture demonstrates our longstanding inclination to look to her as a blank slate on which to place our trickiest fantasies. Long before there were divorce parties, there was Nicole Kidman.

Maybe you prefer her as a musical star in Moulin Rouge! (lest we forget, she and costar Ewan McGregor had a mini “love” reunion on the Oscars stage this year), or sliding into the art-house world of Lars von Trier’s highly polarizing Dogville?

Let’s contemplate the way she swung from superhero to witch; from Virginia Woolf (for which she won the Oscar) to Princess Grace to Lucille Ball to tortured wife on Big Little Lies, which kicked off her producer era (of the 10 TV shows she’s been in since, she’s credited as an executive producer on all but two of them) and arrived the same year Kidman vowed to work with a female director every 18 months to address Hollywood gender disparities — a pledge that she has since surpassed.

She has both an Oscar and a Razzie. She’s the voice of the AMC theater commercial trailer; so ridiculous it’s now iconic. If you go to an AMC and don’t find Kidman assuring you that you are here for magic, you feel short-shrifted. And with a single Las Culturistas aside, she brought Tweety Bird into our present consciousness anew (this is not one that TikTok is letting go of anytime soon).

In September, she filed for her second divorce, from her husband of nearly 20 years, Keith Urban, before promptly showing up at the Chanel show with their two daughters sporting the most covetable Charvet collaboration shirt of the collection. And then, just last month she revealed that following the death of her mother she was training as a death doula, launching a round of features from People to The New York Times about what that meant exactly.

Perhaps the real question is, who hasn’t Nicole Kidman been… yet?

To put it in the parlance of 2026 internet (and specifically TikTok user @andrewkyle55), Nicole Kidman has been #NicoleKidmanMaxxing since day one. She was an internet trend before there was an internet as we know it. And it’s possible that it’s only now that she reemerges once again, post-Urban — somehow looking more natural (everything is relative, of course) and carefree than ever — that we are fully noticing the genius and the power behind all this… Nicole Kidman. A woman who has forever managed to balance power and ambition with the silly and the serious.

Still, what is perhaps most interesting about Nicole Kidman is that it’s sometimes easier to talk about her by noting what she’s not. She’s not an actress with a clothing line. Or a skin care line. She has not launched a wellness brand. Or a podcast. Does she have an Instagram? I had to look. Somehow Nicole Kidman has managed to be all things to all audiences, and at the same time it can feel like the longer she’s been in our lives, the less we’re able to put our finger on her. There is a strange comfort to this consistency; she is everyone and no one. Ever present, and never really there.

At a time when we are under the illusion that we know everything about everyone, this feels nothing short of miraculous. And mysterious.

At a party in Paris in April among a group of similarly aged women, I asked what the secret to Nicole Kidman was.

• “I love that I don’t think about her,” one woman told me.
• “She has a really good sense of self,” said another.
• “She’s great at what she does, and she’s otherwise noninvasive.”
• “She’s talented, and she has great hair.”
• “I’ll watch anything she does; she takes a risk.”
• “I can hate the movie and still appreciate her work.”
• “She always makes sure she gets to flex a new muscle.”
• “She seems very shrewd.”

If you didn’t know the subject matter, you might easily confuse these remarks for a feminist wellness slogan Instagram account. One could argue it’s just further proof that Nicole Kidman is the consummate actress. Indeed, a glance at the totality of her career, not just the wild highlights, convincingly reveals a woman whose only interest is acting. She is never not acting. You get the sense that, should Hollywood cease to come knocking, Kidman would be found, and happily so, on the local theater stage. Whatever the role, she is up for it.

There have been periods of time when this ever-presence, combined with a cool — temperamentally speaking — public persona, has not worked in her favor. She’s been battered in the press (her Princess Grace biopic; her association with Balenciaga; her relationship with her two children with Cruise, to name a few instances). The fact that her face and body have seemingly ceased to age is sometimes a source of frustration and recrimination. Her acting choices have sometimes been questioned, but never for any real length of time. Because she’s always in motion, onward to the next. (“She’s not punished for doing bad things,” one Paris partygoer noted, backed up by Nicole Kidman’s endless IMDb page.)

Do these moments of critique bother her? One imagines they must, to some degree — she is human. And yet, she soldiers on. She’s currently starring in Margo’s Got Money Troubles and Scarpetta, and has Practical Magic 2 and Big Little Lies Season 3 on deck, and that’s just to name two of a longer list. Since 2024, she’s been in no fewer than 10 productions, half of which I’ve never heard of.

At a time when we are under the illusion that we know everything about everyone, this feels nothing short of miraculous. And mysterious.

But even though she’s never left, she somehow seems to be back. Is it the newfound divorce freedom she appears to be exuding? (After decades of dedicated wig-wearing — she’s the best in the biz on that front, too — those famous curls have recently reappeared.) Is it that we are in an era where women in their prime (i.e., over 40) are suddenly the prime focus of our attention… and for reasons pertaining to pleasure and joy?

And is there a lesson to be learned from Nicole Kidman?

For one, shame is a waste of time. Nicole Kidman, by all appearances, does what she wants, takes on the projects she wants. If there is any calculation in her career, it’s that she’s a person who is interested in constantly being challenged. This is not a woman looking or waiting for permission, or necessarily all that interested in the opinions of other people — a rather extraordinary feature in someone who’s made a life performing. And something we might all spend more time striving for in a world dominated by screens and performative living. Her Tweety Bird enthusiasm went viral not merely because it was unexpected (who knew she had feelings about cartoons?) but because it was passionate — hearing her near-orgasmic exultations suggests Nicole Kidman believes no pleasure is worth anything less than full-bodied enjoyment.

She is determined not to be hemmed in by her age. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. This is a woman who, as much as any public figure on the stage today, is by all literal appearances determined not to age. And yet, between the Miu Miu miniskirt she insisted on sporting on the cover of Vanity Fair’s 2022 Hollywood Issue, sending everyone into paroxysms of shock, and the fraught, complicated older women she played in Babygirl and The Perfect Couple, she is not going quietly. Or narrowly. And if she’s not, why should any of us? Take a page from Ms. Kidman: Maxxing does not have age limits.