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In "The Stepford Wives," Nicole Kidman plays Joanna Eberhart, the wife of Matthew Broderick's character, Walter Kresby. Joanna is a powerful, career-minded woman who has a breakdown and moves with her family to Stepford, Connecticut, in hopes of saving her marriage. She soon discovers, however, that the town has a dark secret. Kidman and Broderick sat down to talk about the movie, their characters and the seemingly eternal battle of the sexes.
Tell us about your character.
Nicole Kidman: I play Joanna, who is this high-powered, out-of-control career woman who runs a [television] network. She proceeds to have a breakdown, her whole family is falling apart, and her husband takes her off to the town of Stepford, Connecticut, for her to recover, and she goes because she wants to sort of salvage their marriage. That's how the movies begins.
And it's kind of creepy there, right?
Kidman: Yeah, in Stepford everybody is serene and nobody seems to have any stress and everyone lives in very big houses and nobody rocks the boat, and that's what she finds kind of extraordinary.
The film really takes a darkly comedic look at relations between men and women. In the town of Stepford, the men are really in control, aren't they?
Kidman: There's [this] men's association where the men get together and talk about how they want their wives to be — I suppose it's the dream wife, you know, and how to construct her.
And what exactly is the dream wife, do you think?
Kidman: You ask a lot of men and they say, "Yeah, I would like to go back [to an earlier era], because you know, the 19th century, when women didn't really work and they didn't really have an opinion, and it was all about me ... " [She laughs.] And a lot of men, when they answer that question "Would you prefer your wife to exist completely for you only?" ... if they answer it honestly, a lot of them say yes. I don't know if deep down they would really want it, but it certainly sounds sort of appealing to them, right?
"Stepford" has become something of a shorthand for that sort of thing, for the perfect wife.
Matthew Broderick: "She's very Stepford," you hear, or "He's Stepford." I guess ... it was something that [came about] in the '70s [when the book and first movie version were released] and all these frightened men wanted to make women behave like it was still the '50s.
You're a married man — to "Sex and the City" star Sarah Jessica Parker. Do you think that whole battle-of-the-sexes thing has been resolved?
Broderick: It's the battle that I guess everybody thought would be settled by now, but isn't — you know ... who does what in different marriages, and men are from Mars and all those problems. [He chuckles.] You know, we do like different things sometimes.
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Photo: Andrew Schwartz
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