It’s clear that Nicole Kidman has a deep affinity for women going through excruciating circumstances—Virginia Woolf in The Hours, domestic abuse survivor Celeste in Big Little Lies, undone Grace in The Undoing. Her Prime Video series Expats, which hits the streamer January 26, gives Kidman what may be her most harrowing role of all: Margaret, a mother of three whose youngest child mysteriously goes missing while the family is living abroad in Hong Kong.

“It’s never another day at work,” Kidman says of her proclivity for playing almost-broken women. “It’s a calling. It’s a pull. It’s intense, but it’s not a day at work.”

Based on Janice Y.K. Lee’s novel The Expatriates, Expats was created by The Farewell’s Lulu Wang, who also directs every episode. Wang’s sweeping, expansive limited series follows Kidman’s grieving Margaret; Hilary, a successful yet unsatisfied wife played by Sarayu Blue; and cursed recent college grad Mercy, played by newcomer Ji-young Yoo, as their lives intertwine in Hong Kong. Over the six-episode series, the three women grapple with the issues of race, class, privilege, religion, and most trenchantly, home, as they navigate life away from their mother countries.

Vanity Fair sat down with Kidman and Wang at the Crosby Hotel to chat about staying above water while tackling a traumatic subject matter, lights and shadows, and the next generation of female directors.

Vanity Fair: Both of you have experiences that are expat-adjacent. Nicole, you were born in Hawaii but grew up in Australia; Lulu, you were born in China and moved to the US when you were a child. Did that inform how you approached the project in any way?

Lulu Wang: Definitely. It was one of the main reasons I wanted to do this series, because I saw it as an opportunity to really explore people in diaspora. Hong Kong in particular is such a vibrant intersection of people from so many different places with so many different backgrounds.

Nicole Kidman: I'd been to Singapore to visit my sister because she was living there with her husband and her kids at the time as an expat. Initially, she gave me the book because she went, "Oh, you have to read this. This is so my life." I read it and I saw her trying to go back to see our family, my mother. I'm in America going through a similar thing, but not in the same way because I was born in the States. So there was something where I was like, "Oh, okay, this is still a part of who I am because I was born here."

I think being an expat is primarily, you're living somewhere temporarily. There's a beginning or an end to it, you feel. So it's always like, "Well, when is this going to end?" That was what was interesting to me. And then you have the relationships and then all of the family issues, because it's primarily about family and home.

In Expats, Margaret is going through potentially the worst possible thing that could happen to a mother—not knowing what happened to her son, Gus. Nicole, how do you stay above water when tackling such a heavy subject matter?

Kidman: A lot of it is learning to set boundaries even for myself. I rely heavily on the leader, the director. And so for Lulu to step in and say, "Yes, I'm going to take this whole six hours and I'm going to shape it. I'm going to make it my own, and you are going to fit into the story of it," was a huge relief for me. It was like, "Okay, so someone's taking over." And I get to do what I do, which is act and be part of an extraordinary group of actors. The role itself is like, "Well, what role do you see me as?" If she had placed me into say, one of the other roles, then I would have gone in that direction. I think I even said, "Maybe I could be your Hilary," and you're like, "You're not Hilary." Right?

Wang: We just felt like she was Margaret. The grief, the privilege, it just made sense.

Kidman: She's studious about the casting, and everyone wants to work with her. That's how every single person in the ensemble was put together. And it's very much about us all being able to work together and how that works as a whole tapestry.

Lulu, there’s a particular angle you return to throughout the series—during a crucial moment, you’ll intentionally frame a major character from behind with a lingering tracking shot. It’s disarming, and sort of voyeuristic. How did you land on that shot?

Wang: When you talk about light, you have to also think about shadows. There would be no light without shadow. I think that sometimes there's more emotion when we don't actually see the character's face, and we are projecting those emotions—what their face might look like. So that's something that my DP and I talk about a lot. We know it's risky because oftentimes the studio or producers or whatever might say, "Let's get their face just in case.” or, “Are you sure? We have the whole set. We have Nicole. We have Ji-young. We have our actors here. Let's just do a reverse.” [laughs]

Kidman: She’s like, “No. We know. This will work.”

Wang: And I'm like, "Nope because I know this is what I want."

That’s an auteur.

Wang: And silhouettes too. Sometimes people are like, "We don't see anything." And it’s like, "It's a silhouette!" With the casting, all of these women are so specific in their silhouette. There is an archetype, and they become sort of icons in the way that they stand in their posture, their height, the way they dress.

Kidman: She would say to me, “Stand up” [laughs]. “And your neck. We need to see the neck more.” Remember?

Wang: Mm-hmm.

Kidman: And I would be like, “ugh.” Margaret's falling apart, but she's stoic in the sense of the way she holds herself.

Wang: Yes.

Kidman: Every single frame has been constructed in detail. It's not haphazard, or kind of “Ah, give it a shot. Maybe this will work.” It's all very thought out and there's meaning to so much of it, which I love.

There's so much talk right now about the disparity between male and female directors. What was it like working with Lulu on a show devoted to women?

Kidman: I'm very excited to see people like Lulu—they're the future. They're taking what's been done in the past and now they're going, ‘Okay, I've learned from that, and now I'm going to go and construct the future in a different way.’ I think that's so exciting about these young filmmakers—and young women in particular—stepping forward and going, ‘I have a different point of view here.’ And so necessary, because everything's changing, and we need to have the voices supported. I've been lucky enough to work in the past with some of the greatest filmmakers, and these are the new generation of them coming up, taking the reins.

They need the support. Jen Salke was an incredible partner to us in the sense that she would get on the phone with us and we would talk and go, ‘We need more money.’ [She and Wang laugh.] They would go “No, you can have this amount, not that.” But we were grateful for anything, the support of that. And that is a female executive team in a very powerful position, choosing to support us.