Please cover your eyes if you aren’t prepared to be spoiled: The eponymous, beautiful pair at the heart of Netflix’s The Perfect Couple isn’t perfect, nor is the show specifically about said couple.
To be clear, the series largely exists because if you squint and only pay half attention to it while scrolling your phone, The Perfect Couple could be mistaken for two better shows: Big Little Lies and White Lotus. Just like those splashy HBO hits, The Perfect Couple centers around a dead body that shatters the lives of very wealthy Caucasian people. Similarly, the female characters on the show are married to human pieces of garbage who may or may not also be murderers. And at the heart of it all is a very frazzled, very rich woman on the verge of a complete meltdown.
Of course, viewers are here for Oscar and Emmy winner Nicole Kidman, whose wigs are always full of secrets. This time, she’s playing a matriarch whose moniker is just three last names and is part of one of the wealthiest families in Nantucket.
The Perfect Couple culminates in many final twists: a sex-work-related origin story; a barbiturate-laced drink and a drowning; an illegitimate baby; and the reveal of a convoluted trust fund situation. But more intriguing than any of the twists in this series is perhaps what it says about Nicole Kidman herself. In the last four years, Kidman has acted in six television series. Four of those series involve rich white women and some kind of death shrouded in suspicion, if not an out-and-out murder mystery.
“I was an es-scort!” Kidman’s Greer Garrison Winbury shiver-shouts in the final episode, explaining to her family that she was a sex worker and that their father and possible homicider Tag (Liev Schreiber) was a john.
“Three times! All right? And now I pay for eve-r-ything!” she hisses (Kidman’s accent jumps from Australia to Boston in three syllables), revealing that Greer Garrison Winbury has receipts. “I’m not cleaning everything up for you. I’m done with your ego. I’m done with your bullshit. I am done. Do you hear me? Done. I’m not taking care of everything for everyone anymore.” It’s all sudsy, over the top — much more deliriously delicious than the other adjacent-to-murder women Kidman has played in recent years.
The aforementioned two seasons of Big Little Lies featured Kidman as Celeste Wright, a rich former lawyer and now Monterrey stay-at-home mom with an abusive, adulterous, and freshly dead husband that’s all based on a Liane Moriarty novel. In 2020’s The Undoing, also an adaptation, she plays Grace Fraser, a rich Manhattan psychologist with an adulterous, murdery husband. Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers (2021) is another Moriarty adaptation. In that one, Kidman plays chilling wellness coach Masha Dmitrichenko, who drugs guests with psilocybin at her retreat and was shot once (but not murdered). In Expats, adapted from a 2016 novel by Janice Y.K. Lee, which premiered on Amazon this year, Kidman plays Margaret Woo, a neglected wife mourning the kidnapping (and death) of her son while also investigating a recently deceased neighbor as the possible kidnapper-pedophile-murderer.
If there’s a story in which a frazzled rich white woman is slightly aloof yet extremely adjacent to nefarious hijinks, Nicole Kidman, her agent, and a streaming service aren’t far behind. Bonus points if it’s based on a book touted as a beach read and written by Moriarty.
Kidman’s choices and work ethic have come under a little bit of scrutiny. She’s not making enough serious stuff and perhaps is in a little too much television for a serious actress, the argument goes. But that undercuts an actress who has already won top awards in both movies and television, and is also producing the shows she’s starring in. She’s doing what she wants to do, and from the intense wiggery to the chewy monologues about how many exact times she charged her now-husband for sex, it seems like she’s having plenty of fun creating these fizzy melodramas. And Kidman has famously admitted to taking roles for the fun of it!
The more you watch Kidman’s various blonde lace fronts and accents, the more it feels like she’s in on the joke or committing to a bit, taking the morbidity and macabre out of death by stealing the spotlight with her routine portrayal of these soapy protagonists. Playing Greer Garrison Winbury is just her latest role in a story where death functions like a great equalizer, as it is the only thing the rich can’t use their millions of dollars to hide from (especially if a SOB husband happens to be a murderer).
What is it about murder mysteries and affluent women that speaks to Nicole Kidman? Does she like television more than movies? Is there some kind of fun playing wealthy women with awful, possibly murderous husbands? Does she just really want to be in a season of White Lotus but is simply too famous?
We’re free to come up with our own conclusions about the why for her, but that Kidman keeps giving us these six- to eight-episode seasons as breadcrumbs is part of the pleasure.