The era of Time’s Up is upon us, but it was a long road to get here marked with various conversations about sexual and domestic abuse. The HBO mini-series Big Little Lies was one of those conversation starters thanks to Nicole Kidman‘s portrayal of Celeste, a woman suffering from abuse at the hands of her husband (played by Alexander Skarsgard). “Obviously, playing Celeste in Big Little Lies was a particular look at that, abuse and domestic abuse. There’s been a huge unraveling this year. We’re in a position now to elicit change. We can all do it together,” Nicole tells HollywoodLife.com in an interview. “I think it’s so important right now that we’re all together, and that we’re helping each other, and that we can really make change happen, make this place a safer world for all of us, actually, and redefine how we look at the use of power, and what abuse is.”
Throughout the series, Celeste struggles alone as she tries to hide and downplay her abuse from her therapist and friends Madeline and Jane, played by Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley, respectively. By the end of the series Laura Dern and Zoe Kravitz‘s characters who were otherwise at odds with the main protagonists earlier on, have been welcomed by the group of women as they all rely on each other in the aftermath of Celeste’s husband being outed as a serial abuser. “We couldn’t believe the way in which people connected to Big Little Lies, but particularly to the storyline of Celeste and the abuse,” Nicole said. “Being involved now in helping to change things so that this generation, next generation, won’t be dealing with things that have been happening like this.”
Big Little Lies sends a message that when women support one another, they can work toward challenging their abusers and make the world a safer place — which is exactly the aim of Time’s Up and #MeToo. While we wait for season 2 of the series to air on HBO (likely sometime in 2019), we have a lot of work to do in our own world to overcome the same challenges Celeste did in the mini-series.
HollywoodLifers, what do you think of Nicole’s take on the Time’s Up movement?