Nicole Kidman Was Nearly Unrecognizable In This Award-Winning Role

If there's one actor who will slip into any disguise for the sake of her work, it's Nicole Kidman. Her phenomenal range means that the Australian star has portrayed a wide variety of characters over the years, and together with each project's costume department, she pulls every stop to aesthetically embody those figures. Recently, she's been transformed in films such as 2021's "Being the Ricardos," where she played Lucille Ball, and 2023's "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom," where she transformed into Atlanna. But still, the one role where she looked the furthest from herself remains 2002's "The Hours."

Portraying esteemed novelist Virginia Woolf, Kidman is so unrecognizable in this flick that many fans would have missed her were it not for her billing. There was also the fact that she won an Oscar for the portrayal, which follows Woolf as she writes "Mrs. Dalloway" in 1925 while simultaneously experiencing depression. The film also features some other big names: Julianne Moore plays 1951 housewife Laura Brown, who's struggling in a miserable marriage, while Meryl Streep portrays Clarissa Vaughn, who's dealing with the decline of her friend Richard, a poet diagnosed with AIDS, in 2001 New York. 

Aside from her acting skills, Kidman brought Woolf to life with the help of a dark-brown wig, which is half the reason that she looks so unlike herself in this movie (Nicole Kidman's real-life hair is, after all, so different from the wigs she wears). But it also comes down to the prosthetic nose she wore, which made her look like a completely different person. Our plastic surgeon confirmed that Nicole Kidman's face has changed over the years, but this nose took the changes to a whole new level.

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Nicole Kidman is no stranger to wearing wigs, but the addition of the prosthetic nose that she wore to portray Virginia Woolf is really what made her so unrecognizable in this role. And while it certainly brought the character to life, the costuming decision to give Kidman a fake nose wasn't taken lightly. 

"I said to [Kidman], 'I can't honestly put a 1917 hat on your head with that nose,'" costume designer Ann Roth recalled to The New York Times in 2023. Twenty years earlier, she told the Los Angeles Times that the "Moulin Rouge" actor needed a "jolt, a kick-start" to help bring Woolf out of her. But while Roth is considered a master of her craft in the film industry — and was even invited to work on 2023's "Barbie" in her 90s — not everyone agreed that it was the right choice to make Kidman so hard to spot. According to Roth, since-disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein wasn't impressed with the nose, saying to her at the time, "I paid a million dollars for that girl, and no one knows who she is" (via The New York Times). "Pretty much everyone was nervous about the nose — the idea of sabotaging Nicole's beauty," Michael Cunningham, who wrote the source novel, told Vanity Fair in 2023, with the outlet revealing that Kidman herself had her doubts at the time. "I was fearful that the minute I walked on people would start to laugh," she reportedly said.

Regardless of the effect the nose had on her beauty, there's no denying that the prosthetic piece allowed fans to feel like they were watching a legendary novelist come to life. Of course, "The Hours" isn't the only time the "Big Little Lies" star has changed her look for a character. Here's our list of Nicole Kidman's wigs ranked by how well they suit her face.