Kidman explained at an event earlier this year that she’s Morgan Freeman
Credit: Michael Kovac/Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- The cast of Lioness works hard behind the scenes to make sure they understand the “dense” scripts Taylor Sheridan gives them, says star Nicole Kidman
- “We are just completely always working,” she said at a Paramount+ event in April, sharing that she is frequently running lines with costars Morgan Freeman and Michael Kelly before they call action
- New episodes of Lioness season 3 drop Sundays on Paramount+
The stakes are high on Lioness, and the cast works hard to make sure they nail every take.
The Taylor Sheridan CIA thriller series boasts an all-star cast including Zoe Saldaña, Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman, and the work never stops, even when the cameras aren’t rolling.
“We have to understand every single thing we’re saying,” Kidman said of the “dense” scripts she and her castmates work through in every episode. “And that is a huge [undertaking].”
“It has to come trippingly off your tongue. You have to understand everything, and it has to [seem like] something that you are using as everyday language all the time, which obviously we’re not,” she said at Paramount+’s The Icons of Taylor Sheridan’s Universe event in April. “Michael Kelly and I, and Morgan Freeman, we are just completely always working.”
Credit: Lauren “Lo” Smith/Paramount+
Kidman, 59, said that she and her costars often “run lines” before a take — and then they make sure they understand those lines. “We also do, ‘What does that mean? Decipher it.’ Definition, definition, definition. So that we constantly understand what we’re talking about,” she adds.
In the series, which returned for its third season on Aug. 2, Kidman plays CIA supervisor Kaitlyn Meade, alongside Kelly as CIA Deputy Director of Operations Byron Westfield and Freeman as Secretary of State Edwin Mullins. Saldaña plays Joe McNamara, a CIA officer who leads the titular undercover team.
In season 3 of Lioness, Joe “walks the line between duty and home as unseen forces circle her world,” per the official logline. “Patterns appear where they shouldn’t, names vanish, and paths rearrange. Guided by Kaitlyn and Westfield, Joe confronts enemies operating in the shadows, leaving her to reckon with a war that now reaches into every part of her life.”
Credit: Ryan Green/Paramount+
Kidman has previously compared working on the series to “doing a thesis in the CIA.” She said at the streamer’s April event that she has a team of people “that do my research on every single term that I’m using so that I know everything I’m talking about,” on top of the fact-checking that Sheridan, 56, does himself.
“Taylor is so [relevant]— particularly with Lioness, and particularly season 3,” she added. “It’s like, wow, it’s so topical, and you’re constantly treading in these minefields, and you’ve got to keep up, like, really keep up, because it’s really hard to follow.”
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Freeman, 89, has been equally effusive about the show’s creator. He told The New York Times that Sheridan’s writing “has to do more with the human experience, what people are actually going through, emotionally, in a lot of cases.”
“You saw that a lot in Yellowstone, and you actually see it a lot in any of his writings. And here, in Lioness, in Joe’s case, for instance, he is dealing with a woman whose life is on the line very often. She has kids and a husband. She makes decisions and she has to consider these. It takes courage to write about stuff like that, and Taylor seems to have an awful lot of it.”
New episodes of Lioness air Sundays on Paramount+.
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