Nicole Kidman has revealed her next role: death doula.
The Australian actor revealed she is now training to be a death doula – professionals who provide emotional, physical and psychological support to the dying – while speaking at the University of San Francisco.
A doula, typically, is a professional who helps mothers during pregnancy and childbirth in a non-medical capacity. Death doulas have become more common in recent years – one was recently depicted in an episode of The Pitt – with some preferring the term “end-of-life doula”.
Kidman told the audience that the idea to become a death doula came to her after her mother, Janelle Ann, died aged 84 in 2024.
It “may sound a little weird”, she admitted.
“As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide,” Kidman said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Between my sister and I, we have so many children and our careers and our work, and wanting to take care of her because my father wasn’t in the world any more, and that’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.’”
“So that’s part of my expansion and one of the things I will be learning,” she said.
In September 2024, Kidman won the best actress award for her role in Babygirl at the Venice film festival, but missed the ceremony to be with family when her mother died. Her father, Antony, died in 2014.
Kidman isn’t alone in Hollywood: the Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao has also trained as a death doula, due to her fear of death.
“I have been terrified of death my whole life. I still am,” Zhao told the New York Times in January. And because I’ve been so afraid I haven’t been able to live fully … And because I’m so scared of it, I have no choice but to start to develop a healthier relationship with it, or the second half of life would be too hard. It shouldn’t be this terrifying that I can’t even live.”