Nicole Kidman, 58, ended up in the hospital on the day she filmed her pro-wrestling scene for Apple TV’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles.
Kidman’s co-star, Nick Offerman, 55, told People he heard Kidman might not make it to film the big scene. The shoot day was the actress’s first for her character, lawyer and former pro wrestler, “Lace.” Her character reunites with Offerman’s Jinx at a fan convention to revel in the glory of their wrestling days. It was a “huge set piece,” Offerman told the site, with “hundreds of extras.”
“We’re there in the morning, we’re getting warmed up, some of us are going to be performing some actual wrestling, and so we have our doubles, we have people we’re working with,” he said. “And the word comes in that Nicole has the flu, and we might not get Nicole today. And we’re like, ‘Oh no, that’s such a bummer, because we only have the one day that we’ve built this whole circus for.’” Kidman is also an executive producer on the series.
Offerman said he got the news that Kidman might not show around eight a.m. “Come to be about 11:00 a.m., the word comes in: Nicole’s coming.” The “astonishing” thing the actress did next landed her in the hospital. When she arrived, Offerman said the actress was “so pale, shaken. She just had the flu really so bad” and was “so sick,” he said.
Still, he said, “She showed up and made sure that we got every shot of her, total superhero style, did everything we needed to so that we did not lose one scrap of what we needed for her character,” he said. Powering through came at a cost, however, when, afterward, Kidman was “literally taken to the hospital for an IV,” he recalled.
“It was so generous. It was astonishing,” Oferman said. “And I just said to her, I already admired you so much, but this is how you get to be Nicole Kidman, is you show up so that your show doesn’t lose a minute of your value,” he added.
Kidman, for her part, seemed to have no regrets when she told People at the series’s New York premiere earlier this month that she would “love to do more wrestling.” She admitted that while preparing for the scene, however, she was “so scared about getting injured.”
“When I got in the ring, I just went, ‘OK, let’s go,’” she added. “‘Cause whenever I do something, I go, ‘OK, I’ve gotta be really careful,’ and then I just forget about any sort of protection in my body, and I go crazy.”
The series, which stars Elle Fanning, Kidman, Offerman, and Michelle Pfeiffer, is now streaming on Apple TV.
