While Nicole Kidman recently admitted that she was “deeply depressed” while filming her movie Destroyer, the 51-year-old has now also revealed that she was very close to dropping out of a movie that earned her an Oscar.

Nicole showed up in London to talk about her career during a Bafta lecture. Nicole was there for the Life in Pictures event, an event that also found her talking about gender imbalance in the industry. During the lecture, Nicole said that she almost bailed on playing Virginia Woolf in the 2002 film The Hours.

Nicole Kidman
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“It was interesting because I got very, very scared and tried to pull out of it because I was going through things in my own life,” Nicole recalled. “I just felt ‘I’m completely overwhelmed and is there any way you can cast somebody else?’ To which they said ‘no, get on the plane. Get here’. And then I just got so immersed in her. I started to — she just came into me, I don’t know any other way to explain it.” I wonder if Nicole told herself, “Hey, I survived Tom Cruise I can survive this too.”

And this wasn’t the first time that Nicole considered dropping out of a role as she has had the same thought multiple times but ultimately she reconsiders, describing her job as “this slow thing that pulls me back and I love it.”

Nicole did go on to win a Best Actress award for her role in The Hours so it looks like she did the right thing in sticking with it. Nicole also touched on the gender imbalance in Hollywood, stating: “I made a pledge a couple of years ago to work with a female director every eighteen months because you’ve got to act to change the statistics; I have to do something. We can talk about it and we can all talk about it or I can actually just get out there and do it.”

Nicole can now be seen in Boy Erased and soon in Destroyer, Aquaman, and of course the new season of Big Little Lies.