Susanne Bier Will Direct ‘The Undoing’ Limited Series, Starring Nicole Kidman
Susanne Bier, director ofThe Night Managerand the upcomingBird Box, will directNicole Kidmanin HBO’sThe Undoinglimited series. This will be Kidman’s second starring role in a limited HBO series, following her work onBig Little Lies. Appropriately enough,Big Little LieswriterDavid E. Kelleywill also be writingThe Undoing, a mystery based on the novelYou Should Have Known.
Nicole Kidman is sticking with David E. Kelley and HBO. After working with both forBig Little Lies, Kidman will star inThe Undoing, and now the limited series has found its director: Susanne Bier. Bier directed the entire limited seriesThe Night Manager, and the upcoming Netflix movieBird Box, starring Sandra Bullock. Bier will direct all six episodes ofThe Undoing, in which Kidman plays a therapist whose husband disappears.
The limited series is based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2014 novelYou Should Have Known.Here’s the novel’s synopsis:
Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself, devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son, Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice. Grace is also the author of the forthcomingYou Should Have Known, a book in which she castigates women for not valuing their intuition and calls upon them to pay attention to their first impressions of men.
But weeks before the book is published, a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only a chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.
I haven’t seenBird Boxyet, but I loved Bier’s work onThe Night Manager, and am interested to see what she does here. Kidman, meanwhile, remains one of our best working actresses, worth watching in anything. “David has created another propulsive series with a fascinating, complicated female role at its center,” Kidmansaidwhen the project was first announced. Kidman will also return for HBO’sBig Little Liesseason 2, which Kelley will also write.Big Little Lieswas originally supposed to be a limited series with one season, but the show’s popularity resulted in HBO ordering more.Big Little Liesseason 2 arrives in 2019. No date has been set yet forThe Undoing.
