If you’re not ready to be spoiled, cover your eyes. The beautiful couple at the center of Netflix’s The Perfect Couple of the same name aren’t perfect, and the show isn’t even about them.
Let me be clear: this series exists because if you squint and only half pay attention while scrolling on your phone, The Perfect Couple is the better choice of two shows, The Big. This is because it could be mistaken for “Little Lies” and “White Lotus.” Much like that splashy HBO hit, The Perfect Couple revolves around a corpse that shatters the lives of extremely wealthy white people. Similarly, the show’s female characters are married to human trash who may or may not be murderers. And at the center of it all is a very exhausted, very wealthy woman on the verge of a complete breakdown.
Of course, viewers are here for Oscar and Emmy Award-winning Nicole Kidman, but his wig is always full of secrets. This time, she plays the matriarch of one of Nantucket’s wealthiest families with only three last names.
The Perfect Couple culminates in a number of final developments. It’s an origin story related to sex work. Drinks containing barbiturates and drowning. illegitimate baby. The complex trust fund situation then became clear. But perhaps the most interesting development of all in this series is what Nicole Kidman has to say about herself. In the past four years, Kidman has appeared in six television series. Four of those series, if not outright murder mysteries, involve wealthy white women and some kind of death shrouded in suspicion.
“I was an escort!” Kidman’s Wimberly of Greer garrison shudders in the final episode, explaining that she is a sex worker and their father and possible murderer, Tug (Liev Schreiber). I explained to my family that it was John.
Nicole Kidman portrays the way a writer sits while writing at home. Provided by Netflix
“Three times! Okay? And now I pay for everything!” she hisses (Kidman’s accent jumps from Australia to Boston in three syllables), and Greer Garrison Winberry takes the receipt. reveals that it has “I’m not cleaning everything up for you. Your ego is over. Your shit is over. It’s over. You hear me? It’s over. I’m done with everyone now. ‘I don’t mean to.’ It’s all bubbly and over-the-top, far more engrossingly delicious than any of the other murder-adjacent women Kidman has played in recent years.
In the aforementioned two seasons of Big Little Lies, Kidman played the role of Celeste Wright. Celeste Wright is a wealthy former lawyer and current housewife in Monterrey with an abusive and unfaithful husband and a recently deceased mother, all based on Liane Moriarty’s novels. In the 2020 film The Undoing, she plays Grace Fraser, a wealthy Manhattan psychologist whose husband is an extramarital murderer. Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers (2021) is another Moriarty adaptation. In it, Kidman plays Masha Dmitrichenko, a chilling wellness coach who administers psilocybin to guests at a retreat and is once shot (but not murdered). In The Expats, which was based on the 2016 novel by Janis Y. She plays Margaret Wu, a neglected wife who is being investigated as a possible suspect. Pedophile murderer.
If there’s ever a story about a jaded, wealthy white woman coming into close contact with slightly aloof, yet nefarious criminals, Nicole Kidman, her agent, and the streaming service are no strangers to it. . Bonus points if it’s based on a book advertised as The Beach That Moriarty Wrote.
Kidman’s choices and work ethic have come under some scrutiny. There’s an argument that she doesn’t do enough serious work, and that she’s probably on TV a little too much for a serious actress. But that would diminish the value of an actress who has already won top awards in both film and television and has produced shows in which she has starred. she’s doing what she wants to do. From her intense wiggling movements to her crunchy monologues about exactly how many times she’s done it, she’s doing what she wants. She seems to have a lot of fun creating these dizzying melodramas, even though she charges her current husband with sex. And Kidman famously admitted that she took the role for fun.
The more we see of Kidman’s various blonde lace fronts and accents, the more it feels like she’s in on the joke or in on the little bit, the everyday portrayals of these soapy protagonists. Stealing the spotlight takes the morbidity and creepiness out of death. Greer Garrison Winberry plays Greer Garrison Winberry in her latest role in a story where death acts like the great equalizer because it’s the one thing the rich can’t spend their millions of dollars to hide behind. (especially if the SOB’s husband happens to be a murderer).
How Greer Garrison Winberry, played by Nicole Kidman, gives a coastal grandma, with murder. Provided by Netflix
What does it say about Nicole Kidman about murder mysteries and wealthy women? Does she prefer TV to movies? Playing a wealthy woman with a terrible, possibly murderous husband is kind of Are you looking forward to it? Does she really just want to be part of the White Lotus season and is she simply too famous?
We’re free to draw our own conclusions about her reasons, but part of the joy is that Kidman continues to provide these six- to eight-episode seasons as breadcrumbs.
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