Nicole Kidman Explains What It Was Like to Reconnect With Zoë Kravitz After Almost Marrying Lenny Kravitz

The actress has rarely spoken publicly about her romance with the rockstar

By Samantha Schnurr Feb 16, 2017 2:06 PMTags

Life has come full circle for Nicole Kidman

On the heels of her Golden Globe, SAG Award and Oscar-nominated performance in Lion, the movie star will soon return to the small screen in HBO's crime drama series, Big Little Lies. While the project was a welcomed change of medium, the show also shook up her personal life in more ways than one. 

To start, it reconnected her with co-star Zoë Kravitz, the only child of her former flame, Lenny Kravitz. "Well, I knew Zoe because I was engaged to her father," Kidman said in an interview with NET-A-PORTER.com's digital magazine, The EDIT. "It's all in the family! I love Lenny; he's a great guy." 

While an engagement was rumored during the stars' brief romance in the early 2000s, Kidman, who has been married to Keith Urban since 2006, never confirmed the claims until now. As for why the two never said "I Do," she told Vanity Fair in 2007, "It just wasn't right. I wasn't ready. We weren't ready." 

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Nicole Kidman & Keith Urban: Romance Rewind

All these years later, her reunion with Kravitz's daughter was welcomed, but there were other elements of shooting the miniseries that took a much darker toll on the actress. 

"I was quite traumatized after [filming] because we would shoot [the violent scenes] repeatedly. I was emotionally and physically traumatized. I'd come back and I'd need Keith to hold me, just to feel soothed. I think it worked on my psyche in a way that I didn't quite realize. As an actress, I don't clock in and out; it does bleed in and sometimes it's hard to process," she explained.

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"One of the craziest things happened after we'd done a lot of violent scenes. When you see them in the show they're flashes, but we needed to re-shoot them and re-shoot them so [director Jean-Marc Vallée] could get grabs of stuff. I couldn't sleep and the next morning I got up and went for a run to try and get some of [Celeste's] energy out. I came back  and I'd left my key, I couldn't get in the door. It's a glass door, so I got a rock and I threw the rock through the door. I'd never done anything like that. And then I realized, 'Oh my gosh, that's how much I'm holding all this in, the anger, the pain.'" 

Despite the show's deep-seated emotional effect, Kidman is part of project that puts female characters at the forefront—the kind of project Kidman spent her childhood fighting toward. 

"My mother was part of the Women's Electoral Lobby and she would take me to hand out pamphlets when there was voting on behalf of feminism. That's how I was raised; we would sit in the back rooms of the WEL while they were all talking. I remember sitting there listening, sort of not understanding but understanding that there was a movement happening, that as women we were powerful together, that we needed to have equality," she recalled to the magazine. "I was teased at school for my mum being a feminist. I just said, 'OK, it doesn't matter. I'll stand up for what I believe in.'"

To see The EDIT's full interview with Nicole Kidman, go here or download the free EDIT app at the App Store and Google Play.