Nicole Kidman Reveals Who Encouraged Her Amid Lucille Ball Backlash

Nicole Kidman isn’t letting the critics get her down.

The 54-year-old actress faced backlash earlier this year when news broke that she’d been cast as Lucille Ball in Amazon Studios’ Being the Ricardos, the new biopic about the iconic comedian and her husband Desi Arnaz. Internet critics said she neither looked nor sounded like Lucille, and it made the Oscar winner consider dropping out, she said in a new interview with Today. 

“I tried not to [listen to the criticism], but I’m a human being, so there’s time when you go, ‘Gosh, maybe I’m not the right person for this,'” she shared. She credits director and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin as her source of encouragement during the difficult time. “That’s where having somebody like Aaron, who really said at the beginning, he was like, ‘I’m not wanting a perfect rendition or imitation of Lucy. No, no, no, no, no.'”

Instead, Aaron was looking for someone who could connect with Lucille’s story, and Nicole said there’s “a lot of it I can relate to” as one actress to another.