Nicole Kidman has won an Oscar and worked with cinema greats such as Jane Campion and Stanley Kubrick. But that cuts no ice with her budding filmmaker daughter, Sunday Rose.

The teenager, known as Sunny to family and friends, makes amateur films on her iPad and, according to her mother, is ‘chomping at the bit to go to film school . . . but at 13 and a half, she’s too young’.

And despite having an award-winning Hollywood star under the same roof, the last person she wants to cast in her pictures ‘is her mum’, Nicole told me.

‘I’m like: ‘Do you want me?!’ And she says: ‘No!’ she added, laughing down the line from her farm in Sutton Forest, 90 minutes south-west of Sydney, where she has been spending time with musician husband Keith Urban, Sunny and sister Faith.

‘She may change her mind,’ she added; but given that her daughter’s been a film nut since she was eight, she doubts it.

‘The great thing about her age group is that they can make films on their iPads and iPhones. They learn to edit, lay in sound,’ the 54-year-old marvelled.

Jane Campion, who directed Kidman in The Portrait Of A Lady 26 years ago, has mentored her daughter, advising Sunny to go to art school as a first step towards understanding visual framing.

‘As Keith says: ‘You’ve got to learn rhythm guitar before you learn electric’,’ Nicole said.

We’d been chatting about how teenage girls are discovering, and relating to, the comedic and business know-how of Lucille Ball, the legendary funny lady Kidman portrays in Being The Ricardos. 

Aaron Sorkin’s delicious drama, which is streaming now on Amazon Prime, is set behind the scenes of Ball’s signature TV hit I Love Lucy, which she made with her first husband Desi Arnaz.

‘I thought women in their 20s might be enthralled,’ Kidman said, ‘but I didn’t think younger girls would be.’

She believes Ball’s renewed popularity is down to the fact that ‘she’s such a cool woman, and a cool woman is timeless’.

Lucille’s gift for physical comedy was just what the nascent television industry of the late 1950s and early 1960s needed — and what she needed, too, lifting her from barrel-scraping B films to become a national treasure.

Kidman noted that Ball showed a ‘talent to withstand so many failures, and to turn lemons into lemonade, to quote Beyoncé!’.

Mastering Sorkin’s rapid-fire dialogue required weeks of work, too. She found that the experience of playing pioneering scientist Rosalind Franklin in the play Photograph 51, for director Michael Grandage in the West End, helped. 

If she could ‘absorb all that scientific data’, she could do the same with Sorkin’s whip-smart script. ‘He likes writing a lot of words!’ she commented. 

Kidman is contemplating a return to the stage, perhaps in 2023, in a new version of a Greek tragedy. ‘It’s in my future,’ she said, though she refused to name the play.

More recently, she participated in one of eight, 30-minute dramas for an anthology series called Roar that will be shown later in the year on AppleTV+. She and fellow Australian Judy Davis, working together for the first time, play a mother and daughter in a tale of magical realism.

The actress had an all-too real experience working with director Robert Eggers, along with her Big Little Lies husband Alexander Skarsgard, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Defoe, Ethan Hawke and Bjork on the film The Northman, in cinemas on April 22.

 ‘Alex leads the Vikings, of course,’ she said, adding that she plays a Viking queen in a supporting role.

‘There was so much mud in that film. I was covered in it. And it was so bitterly cold.’ But she was still up for it. 

‘I’ve always loved extremes. And Lucille, for me was, extreme — without the mud! Nothing comes close to her.’

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