Director Karyn Kusama and Nicole Kidman are working together for the first time on character study/cop thriller Destroyer. The first image of Kidman's worn, tough central character has emerged courtesy of Vanity Fair and Kusama is talking about it.
Destroyer finds Kidman as LAPD detective Erin Bell who, earlier in her career, was placed undercover with a cult-like gang in the California desert. The case ended in tragedy, but when the leader of the gang remerges on to law enforcement's radar years later, she has to work her way through the surviving members to track them down, confronting the demons of her own past.
The role requires some prosthetics work and make-up, which Kidman is no stranger to. "We always knew that what we wanted her to look like was a real middle-aged woman with a past that she wears on her face," Kusama tells the magazine. "With sun damage and sleep deprivation and stress and rage, just in her whole physical body."
Writer Matt Manfredi started working on the basic ideas more than 10 years ago with script partner Phil Hay (who is married to Kusama), and they've now coalesced them into the screenplay for Destroyer.
"We've all loved bank robbery stories as a place to start, because they almost never go well," Kusama says. "There’s a kind of particular American madness to thinking you’ll be the one who gets away clean. We were really focusing on characters who weren’t criminal masterminds, but fringe dwellers of American society. Yet they still hold out the hope that they’d beat the system."
The cast also includes Tatiana Maslany, Bradley Whitford and Sebastian Stan, and the film will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next month, ahead of a 25 December release in the States. There are no details on a UK date yet.
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