Nicole Kidman admits she used to lie about her height to secure auditions

The ‘Big Little Lies’ star said she was once told she ‘wouldn’t have a career’ because of her height

Nicole Kidman has confessed that she used to fib about her height to secure auditions in the early years of her career.

The 5ft 11 (1.8 metres) actor said that she used to pretend she was 5ft 10 and a half after she was told she wouldn’t make it in Hollywood because she was “too tall”.

“I was told, ‘You won’t have a career. You’re too tall’,” Kidman, 56, said in a recent interview on the Radio Times Podcast.

“People would say, ‘How’s the air up there?’ Now, I get, ‘You’re so much taller than I thought’, or men grappling with how high my heels should be,” the Australian actor added. “Whenever I go on the red carpet, I get sent shoes that are always so high. I’m like, ‘Do they have a kitten heel? I’m going to be the tallest person – a giraffe!’”

She then recalled a time in her childhood when was passed up for a role in the musical Annie because she was two inches taller than the 5ft 2 inch cut-off.

Kidman said that the young girls being considered for the role weren’t allowed in the audition room until they were measured.

She explained that despite her height, she was given the chance to audition after pleading for the opportunity.

Brian Tee and Nicole Kidman in ‘Expats’ (Courtesy of Prime Video)

“I didn’t get the part,” the Moulin Rouge! star said. “I didn’t even get a call back – but at least I got to sing four lines of a chorus.”

Fellow Aussie native Chris Hemsworth similarly confessed to the Radio Times in 2016 that he also used to say he was shorter than he was to land auditions.

The 6ft 3 actor revealed that “the brief for the audition for Thor said: ‘must be over 6ft 1in’, which I’d never seen before”.

Kidman has gone on to become an incredibly successful actor, having landed her first Oscar nomination in 2002 for Moulin Rouge!, her first Oscar win in 2003 for The Hours, and earning three additional nominations since.

In 2017, she won two Emmys for her leading role on HBO’s Big Little Lies.

She will next star in Amazon Prime Vido’s mini-drama Expats, based on Janice YK Lee’s best-selling 1998 novel The Expatriates.

The first two episodes of the six-episode series are scheduled to premiere on 26 January, with new episodes released weekly.