I know, I know. You really wanted to start your Thursday with some Nicole Kidman biscuits. Such is life! Nicole is promoting her cray, urinating-on-Zac-Efron performance in The Paperboy, so she seems to have done a photo shoot “in character” as her trashy, sexy character. I guess. Either that, or this is the New Nicole. The cover of V Mag – which I cropped, I apologize – features Nicole’s butt crack. And in one of the inside photos, you can see her nips. In all of the other photos, we’re being gifted with crotch shots and cleavage. To which I say… sure. Why not? I’m honestly pleased that I’m not looking at yet another Nicole Kidman photo shoot in which she wears immaculate, icy gowns and stares icily at the camera in an austere drawing room. I’m happy that she’s mixing it up.

Another great thing about this shoot? It’s nice to be reminded that Nicole can still do the sexpot thing. She didn’t do the sexpot thing enough when she was younger, and while I do think there’s a “mutton dressed as lamb” thing going on here, it kind of works. Nicole is genuinely beautiful, and she genuinely has an incredible body. But with the good comes the bad – I’m now convinced that Nicole has totally got bolt-ons. And her face is like f—king marble at this point. Anyway, here are some highlights from the V Mag interview:

Nicole goes with the flow: “I don’t really make decisions. I go with the flow. If I were a strategically minded person, I think I would have a far different career. But I would be more outlandish if I could. A lot of times you just don’t get the chance.”

Peeing on Zac Efron: “The peeing thing, I didn’t think was that weird, because I was in character… That was for the jellyfish. And for me it said so much about Charlotte. One, she’s protecting him. Two, she’s tough as nails and no one else is going to pee on this guy. All of that made total sense to me. I just went for it and didn’t overthink it.”

Being a kid who never got to play in the sun, so she would pour through Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert: “At the time I thought it was the cruelest thing, and now I know it was the greatest gift,” she says. “I probably had a strong sexuality as a child, so that informs all that yearning and wanting things, and the hormones that are running through you at a really early age—they all started to surge because of the things I was reading.”

Working on her Oscar-winning role in The Hours: “If you’re being completely drained in your personal life and you’re never being nourished there, it’s very hard to make it work,” she says. “But sometimes, if you meet the right person who will mine it, and you’re open to being mined, it can really work. Stephen was able to mine me. I was crazy in love with him, and so I was like, I’ll do whatever, because I love you. I gave him every part of me that I could give him.”

Parenthood and romance with Keith: “I rented this beautiful house on the beach. I thought, We’ll go and swim in the ocean and just get lost in each other. So we go down, just us, and I’m like, ‘We really should bring the kids.’ And then the kids come down and the whole dynamic changes. Another time, we got one night, and then we were both in tears. It was ridiculous. But time is so precious and I love the sound of them and the feel of them. I just don’t want to miss anything, and I don’t want them to go ‘Where’s my mom?’ So I’m working through that.”

She’ll be working on Lars Von Trier again, and she defends him: “He’s going to do another thing that is going to shock the world,” she says with a laugh. “Charlotte Gainsbourg is doing the lead, but Lars sent me the piece and said, ‘I wrote a part for you.’ He’s done that before and I’ve gone, ‘No you didn’t, Lars, and I’m not playing it.’ But this time I really liked the character, and I like Lars. I think he has made some terrible, terrible statements and mistakes, but I don’t think he really meant what he said. If he did, then I would not be friends with him. You know, he does strange stuff. He tried to get me to come out in a dog collar. And sometimes you just say, ‘Shut up, Lars,’ ‘Put your clothes on, Lars,’ I swear, you do say that to him. But there’s different philosophers in the world, and some of them are going to be extreme and controversial and some of them aren’t. And we need both.”

[From V Magazine]

First, a word about The Hours – I was re-watching it recently, and I didn’t love the same parts of that film as when I watched it originally years ago. When I first saw it, I really did love Nicole’s portrayal of Virginia Woolf… and yes, I still think her performance holds up. But really, Meryl Streep gives the best performance in the film. She holds it all together, she grounds the stories so magnificently. It’s a shame that Meryl didn’t win another Oscar for that role.

Also – the author of the V Mag piece mentions in passing that the topic of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes is “completely off-limits for Kidman”. Which doesn’t really go with her “I go with the flow” statement, you know?

Photos courtesy of V Magazine.