Mental health has been one of the topics that has been most talked about publicly this year, especially after the havoc that the pandemic has wrought in this regard, leaving many people affected by crises of anxiety, depression and sad states. And that is something that can happen to anyone, even famous people. Nicole Kidman has just opened up in an interview in which she has confessed, for the first time, that she suffered from depression while playing Virginia Woolf on The Hours.
It was in an interview with BBC Radio 4's This Cultural Life where the artist opened up, explaining that while she was giving life to the writer who ended up committing suicide in the River Ouse in 1941, she was dealing with her own mental battle.
“I probably didn't consider it dangerous enough,” she said, referring to the scene where Woolf takes her own life. “I don't think I ever thought about the danger, I was so into it,” she explains, adding that she is referring to “putting rocks in her pocket and walking to the river. And again".
Ironically, The Hours was the role that led Nicole Kidman to win the Oscar for Best Actress in 2003. What no one knew was that getting into Virginia Woolf's skin was a much harder exercise than one would have expected. .
"I think at that time I was in a place that was erased, depressed, feeling out of my own body," said the artist, who at that time had just separated from Tom Cruise after eleven years of relationship and two adopted children in common. .
Although the Australian did not want to go into details about the reason why she was going through a depression, she did admit that "the idea of Virginia emerging through me was like an open dam for that to happen."
Kidman did not reveal to anyone what was happening to her, although she sensed that the director, Stephen Daldry, had suspicions of her. “I think that Stephen was so delicate with me because he knew it”, she has declared while he affirmed that “depression hits you at different times”.
Furthermore, she has admitted that she "was open to understanding, which I think is probably part of the beauty of life as an actor." Nicole Kidman also explained that "I have investigated and gone through so many situations of mental health, of loss, of ideas, of joy, and I have given life... you know, life is what it is", concluding that she is dedicated to investigating in that sense much more now than when he was 14 years old, and that he is perfectly aware of the value of that.
