Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldaña Put Their Honesty to the Test
The Lioness stars face Vanity Fair’s lie detector and discover that questions about bad movies, flattery, family and Disney cruises may be harder than anything the CIA throws at them.
Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldaña play women trained to survive secrets and deception in Lioness. Unfortunately, Vanity Fair has a polygraph.
The co-stars take turns interrogating each other about careers, family and the little lies actors occasionally tell to survive Hollywood. Saldaña admits she has pretended to enjoy both a friend’s movie and one of her own, while the machine repeatedly challenges her claim that flattery doesn’t work on her. Eventually, she accepts that words of affirmation may actually be one of her love languages.
There are plenty of career confessions too. Saldaña gets tested on Star Trek trivia and remembers the time her mother mistook Thandiwe Newton for her on a Traffic poster. Kidman, meanwhile, reveals that she recently took genuine time away from work despite an absurdly packed schedule — although supervising seven teenage girls on vacation may stretch the definition of “time off.”
The pair also discuss Lioness, where Saldaña plays CIA operative Joe and Kidman stars as senior intelligence official Kaitlyn Meade. Their obvious friendship makes the interrogation considerably less ruthless than it could have been: whenever the machine threatens to expose something embarrassing, they quickly start defending each other.
By the end, both reach the same conclusion.
For two women starring in an espionage thriller, they would apparently make terrible real-life spies.
