Grief group shot down Nicole Kidman for Rabbit Hole research
We often hear about people bending rules for celebrities, so it was refreshing to hear that Nicole Kidman was told no when she was preparing to play a grieving mother in her latest movie, Rabbit Hole. In the film, Kidman and Aaron Eckhart play parents dealing with the death of their son, and to get the emotions right, Kidman asked to sit in at a support group meeting. “I tried to go to a grief group, and they said, ‘No, you can’t come,’" Kidman recalled. "‘The emotions are too raw, and we can’t have somebody in the group who didn’t go through exactly the same thing,’ which I totally respected.”
“I did attend one bereavement class, and that was probably unethical because you really feel like you’re taking advantage of people who are really laying it out there,” said Eckhart. “You just feel like you’re a liar, so I didn’t do it again.” As an alternative, he turned to the Web for inspiration. “It just has to do with your imagination. The Internet is a great place, because people are posting video blogs as a cathartic way to deal with the loss, so the Internet is a great tool for actors because it doesn’t get any more raw than those video blogs about a father grieving over his son or a son grieving their parent, and they do it on a daily basis over the course of a year.”
Kidman also acted as producer on the film, an experience she describes as being very personal. “When you’re in a film, you’re not responsible for the film. I’m responsible for the film, so it’s a big weight, but I’m glad that we made it.”
See photos of the press conference below.
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