Nicole Kidman's Most Extreme Onscreen Transformations Will Make You Do A Double Take

Throughout her decades-long career, Nicole Kidman has been a chameleon onscreen, taking on some impressive transformations. The naturally blonde and curly-haired Australian actor has donned wigs, prosthetics, and even adopted a plethora of foreign accents.

On Aug. 18, she'll morph yet again — this time into a mysterious Russian-accented wellness retreat owner in Hulu's Nine Perfect Strangers. From red-headed courtesan belting out ballads to playing Virginia Woolf, here's a celebration of some of Kidman’s best physical and auditory transformations.

After Big Little Lies, David E. Kelley adapted another Liane Moriarty thriller, Nine Perfect Strangers. The miniseries follows nine strangers on a remote retreat led by Kidman’s Masha, the sinister white-clad director whose voice could moonlight in a meditation app.

In The Hours, the 2002 film that won Kidman an Oscar, the actor is practically unrecognizable as writer Virginia Woolf in floral frocks, a brunette wig, and a divisive prosthetic nose.

In HBO’s The Undoing (2020), another Kelley production, a red-headed Kidman takes on the role of Grace Fraser, an American therapist whose involvement in a murder case upends her family’s life. She took on a New Yorker accent for the role, and a dialect slip prompted a Saturday Night Live parody.

This time with a South African accent, the actor plays U.N. translator Silvia Broome, whose life is endangered after she hears assassination plans in the Sydney Pollack-directed film The Interpreter (2005). Though she speaks a fictional language (Ku), Kidman’s accent in the movie was chided.

As the raunchy Charlotte Bless, Kidman dons a bouffant and a Southern accent in Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy (2012). Based on a true story from Pete Dexter’s book, she acts alongside John Cusack, Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey, and David Oyelowo.

In another prosthetic-generated change, Kidman is barely recognizable as Mrs. Barbour, the wealthy surrogate mom to Ansel Elgort’s Theo in The Goldfinch, based on Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The 2019 drama follows Theo's grief, symbolized by a painting.

Sporting a brunette bob to match her no-frills Manhattanite wardrobe, Kidman plays executive-turned-docile-robo-housewife Joanna Eberhart in the 2004 remake of Stepford Wives, based on the 1972 novel by Ira Levin. Glenn Close, Bette Midler, and Faith Hill also appear in the film.

Kidman's singing chops shine in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! as Satine, a popular courtesan who falls in love with Ewan McGregor’s Christian. A tragic love story packaged in a musical extravaganza, Kidman performs complex dance sequences as a redhead in gaudy, OTT costumes.

Based on the memoir A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley, Lion (2016) follows Dev Patel as Saroo, who gets lost as a boy and ventures back to his birthplace in India after living with his adoptive Australian family for decades. Kidman, in a red curly bob, plays Sue, his adoptive mom.

In the BBC Two mystery drama Top of the Lake, Elizabeth Moss plays a detective looking into sexual assault cases. In Season 2, which was called China Girl, she’s joined by a freckled, gray-haired Kidman with prosthetic teeth, who plays Julia Edwards, the adoptive mother of a teen connected to a death.