Nicole Kidman spends most of her time in The Northman stalking around the edges of the story. She plays Queen Gudrún in the Viking epic, the steely wife of King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke), whose return home from a near-fatal battle abroad sets the story in motion. Gudrún begins the film resigned to sitting faithfully by his side, tending to their son and quietly presiding over dinner festivities. It doesn’t take long for one to wonder why a scene-stealer like Kidman was cast in such a seemingly small, quiet role. That question remains unanswered until a twisted monologue scene in the film’s third act, one that finally puts all of Kidman’s wild instincts on display.
It takes a while to get there, though. After the king is slain by his brother Fjölnir, the young Prince Amleth (played as a child by Oscar Novak and as an adult by Alexander Skarsgård) must Fjölnir’s away from home. As he does, he gets one last glimpse at his mother, watching her weep over the violent betrayal. (Or so he thinks!) For the rest of the film, his mantra is simple: “Avenge father. Save mother. Kill Fjölnir.” His mother, Amleth imagines, has been suffering at Fjölnir’s side, forced to wed the man who killed her beloved husband.
More than a decade later, after Amleth becomes a hulking Viking warrior, he comes to the farmland that Fjölnir and Gudrún preside over, pretending to be an enslaved prisoner. Though his mother seems to have a fairly peaceful life as Fjölnir’s wife, he sets his plan in motion, massacring Fjölnir’s men and revealing his true identity to his mother in her home.
It’s then that Gudrún tells her estranged son the truth: she never loved his father. In fact, she was glad when he died, and wanted Fjölnir to kill Amleth, too. Her match with Aurvandil was an evil one, she says, telling him she was given to the king as a slave and that Amleth was a product of rape. “Your father endured me because I bore him a son,” she tells him.
It’s at this point that Kidman finally gets to go a little unhinged, eating the camera up with her cruel revelations. Up until this point, Gudrún lives mostly as a memory of Amleth’s, a regal object with no inner life of her own. This scene flips all of that, revealing how naive Amleth’s projections have been. She’s thriving! Traipsing about the village with her new beau! Rebuilding her life, tending to her new son! She’s unflinching as she retells all of this to Amleth, cutting him down to size with her words. Then, after revealing her truth, Gudrún takes things in an Oedipal direction, planting a kiss on her estranged son. It’s all a distraction so she can later try to kill Amleth—but she fails, and he quickly drives a sword through her heart.
Kidman excels at this kind of tempered mania, skillfully elevating arthouse dramas by tackling complicated characters brimming with dark thoughts—the shrewd, smiling fameseeker in To Die For; the bored swan of Eyes Wide Shut; the freaky Southern belle of The Paperboy; the disturbed mother in The Killing of a Sacred Deer. In The Northman, her screen time is far less than what audiences might have expected going in, though that’s likely by design. Where would the surprise be if we could sense all along that Gudrún did not want to be saved? This scene offers explanation for Kidman’s casting, cashing in on her talent and her penchant for grounding an off-the-rails series of revelations.
It’s also one of few scenes in The Northman without cinematic bells and whistles, valuing the craft of acting over anything else. In a film full of physically taxing endeavors, including a highly choreographed raid scene and a naked battle scene, this scene lets Kidman herself deliver the chaos. For Eggers, it was a dreamy anchor in the middle of a difficult shoot. “It was really so pleasurable to get to do some nitty-gritty scene work instead of an action sequence, for fuck’s sake,” he recently told Vanity Fair, praising Kidman’s performance. “That’s one of the scenes I’m truly proud of.”
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