Nicole Kidman’s first day filming as former pro wrestler Lace in Margo’s Got Money Troubles was memorable for the cast — for an unexpected reason.
Nick Offerman, who plays old friend and wrestler Jinx on the new Apple TV series, explained that there was a “huge set piece” involving onscreen daughter Margo (Elle Fanning) and “hundreds of extras.”
“We’re there in the morning, we’re getting warmed up — some of us are going to be performing some actual wrestling, and so we have our doubles, we have people we’re working with,” Offerman, 55, told People on Wednesday, April 22. “And the word comes in that Nicole has the flu, and we might not get Nicole today. And we’re like, ‘Oh no, that’s such a bummer, because we only have the one day that we’ve built this whole circus for.’”
“It’s about 8:00 in the morning that we get this news. Come to be about 11:00 a.m., the word comes in: Nicole’s coming,” he continued.
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Offerman recalled that Kidman, 58, arrived “so sick,” describing her as being “so pale” and “shaken” with a “really bad” flu.
Kidman, however, “showed up and made sure that we got every shot of her, total superhero style, did everything we needed to so that we did not lose one scrap of what we needed for her character,” Offerman said.
After she finished, Offerman said Kidman “was literally taken to the hospital for an IV.”
“And I just said to her, ‘I already admired you so much,’ but this is how you get to be Nicole Kidman, is you show up so that your show doesn’t lose a minute of your value,” he said. “It was so generous. It was astonishing.”
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Margo’s Got Money Troubles, based on Rufi Thorpe’s novel of the same name, stars Fanning as the titular Margo, a student whose life gets derailed when her English professor (Michael Angarano) gets her pregnant. Margo drops out of college and gets limited help from mom Shayanne (Michelle Pfeiffer) while turning to OnlyFans to generate more cash.
Showrunner David E. Kelley quipped to Deadline that they were “trying to get poor Nicole some work wherever we can help her out and boost her career” with her role as Lace.
“I joked before, but it was only half a joke. I thought, ‘OK, we’re going to throw this character at her, a lawyer slash wrestler, and Nicole is going to say, ‘Now you’ve taken it too far. I’m not going to do that.’ But she embraced it,” Kelley told the outlet on Wednesday. “She [said], ‘OK. Can I jump in the ring and actually wrestle?’ And she was fantastic in it. She was believable in the ring, and she was believable as a lawyer. So there’s a reason she gets all those job opportunities. She’s pretty good at her craft.”
Margo’s Got Money Troubles drops Wednesdays on Apple TV.
