It’s hard to imagine a star as big as Nicole Kidman being turned down for any role in 2024.
Apparently, though, that hasn’t always been the case.
While promoting her TV show The Undoing in 2020, the Oscar winner told Marie Claire she had been keen to land a role in a certain iconic rom-com back in the 90s, but got turned down.
“I really wanted the role that Julia Roberts played in Notting Hill,” she told her co-star Hugh Grant, who famously starred in the hit film..
However, Nicole claimed she “wasn’t well known enough” (or, she reckons, “talented enough”) to land the gig.
In the same interview, Nicole admitted to Hugh that Notting Hill wasn’t the only time she had hoped to share the screen with him, only to end up being passed over.
“There was something where I think I really wanted a role... maybe I was gonna do a small role in Love Actually at one point,” she recalled.
When Hugh expressed his surprise she clarified: “It was not a big role.”
Funnily enough, Julia Roberts herself almost passed on Notting Hill when it was first offered to her.
After reading the script, the Pretty Woman actor recalled to Vanity Fair that she told her agent: “How boring. How tedious — what a stupid thing for me to do.”
Eventually, though, she said: “F—, I’m going to do this movie.”
Meanwhile, in a 2024 British Vogue interview, Julia admitted to Notting Hill screenwriter Richard Curtis that playing Anna Scott was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”
“I was so uncomfortable!” she added. “I mean, we’ve talked about this so many times, but I almost didn’t take the part because it just seemed – oh, it just seemed so awkward. I didn’t even know how to play that person.” ”
Either way, Hugh and Nicole were fated to work together in The Undoing (which was nominated for four Golden Globes and two Emmys).
Nicole told Hugh in their joint Marie Claire interview that she’d found working with him to be “easy”, because “I like you”.
“There was something very relaxed, obviously, because I’m Australian and you’re British, we have that... similar, I don’t know, it’s just a sense of humour,” she claimed, celebrating their “good chemistry”.