Instyle June Issue On sale May 17th
The cast of Big Little Lies is covering InStyle’s June issue with 5 separate covers: Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Zoe Kravitz and Laura Dern.
The lives of the cast have overlapped in myriad ways. Nicole and Reese have a production partnership (Big Little Lies is their brainchild). Reese starred with Laura in Wild. Laura starred with Shailene in The Fault in Our Stars. Shailene starred with Zoë in Divergent. Nicole has known Zoë since she dated her father, Lenny Kravitz, 16 years ago. And so it goes. These women’s relationships run much deeper than “ensemble cast”; rather, they have influenced and enriched each other’s lives.
- Reese: I had a conversation last week that I never would have had seven years ago. It was about compensation: what a woman would make on a project versus what a guy in a similar position would make. I went to the mat for that woman. She’ll never know I made that call or had that conversation with the head of a studio. But I said to him, “This is the comp. This white guy over here is making this amount of money, and she’s done this, that, and the other with such success—and you’re asking for her to have a third of that. That’s not OK with me.”
- Shailene: In my early 20s I got rid of everything I owned and lived out of a carry-on. I loved it. As I got older I really craved a home, but now I find myself hungry for constant change again.
- Zoe: I dealt with eating disorders in high school and my early 20s. I always felt like I needed to look like a supermodel to do my job, which I don’t. The supermodels are doing it quite well. But when you’re starting your career, you think you have to be the hot girl who can play some guy’s girl- friend. And then you work more, and you grow up. With Big Little Lies, we were all so hungry to play real characters. It’s not about what we look like, it’s about what we feel like.
- Laura Dern: Not at all. “Ambition” was a dirty word for women when I was a little girl. Women who are ambitious are cold, calculating, and unsexy—that was the idea presented to my generation. To be sexy was to be demure, subservient even. And I was raised by actresses, like my mother [Diane Ladd], my godmother Shelley Winters, my mom’s friend Jane Fonda, and Gena Rowlands. I saw powerful women as artists or daring to challenge the medical profession and fighting to be doctors—but they weren’t in a boardroom. They weren’t CEOs. That’s where the pants came in. And women didn’t wear pants, so they couldn’t do that.
- Nicole Kidman: Other people are o doing things like having a girls’ weekend. I don’t have that because I go home. I want to be with my children and my husband [singer-songwriter Keith Urban]. I will sort of get lost in a character or whatever I’m doing, but I’m constantly working to keep that balance. …… I go home to hug my kids. Literally, I’ll go in and snuggle them. They’ll always be waiting up. I’ll hug my husband too. The greatest thing our family priest told us very early on in our marriage was, “Always kiss hello and kiss goodbye.” It just keeps you connected.
