When we talk about muses, we tend to focus on the most famous examples — Yoko Ono, Audrey Hepburn, Edie Sedgwick, Lee Radziwill, Jane Birkin, even Julia Fox — but there’s one name that deserves to be added to the conversation: Nicole Kidman.
It’s been 36 years since Kidman’s first U.S. film hit theaters, and since then, the Birth actor has starred in more than 75 (!) films and eight TV shows, and inspired a long list of Keith Urban songs during her marriage to the country singer. She has the same level of cultural clout as, say, Marilyn Monroe did during her heyday, and it looks like her relevance isn’t going anywhere, bad wigs be damned. On Aug. 24, burgeoning pop girl Adéla shared the track list for her upcoming album Prima, and sitting pretty at No. 2 is a song titled none other than “Nicole Kidman.”
Adéla isn’t the only pop act to give Kidman her flowers recently. Unless you were traversing the mountains of Spain at the time (guilty), you probably saw the perennial A-list actor pop up in the music video for Troye Sivan’s new single, “She’s the Best.” Beyond their shared Australian connection, Sivan asked Kidman to star in the video because “she’s always just been such a picture of the divine feminine to [him],” per Rolling Stone, and considering she’s portrayed Grace Kelly and Queen Atlanna on screen, it’s not hard to understand why.
This obsession is nothing new: In 2011, Frank Ocean used the dialogue from Kidman’s Eyes Wide Shut unraveling as the outro for the track “Lovecrimes,” and in 2015, MGK called her out by name in the song “World Series.” “I’m gone, rolling with Nicole Kidman,” he sings in the first verse; even rappers-turned-rock-stars know you haven’t made it until you’re brushing shoulders with television’s Celeste Wright. And who could forget the time Charli XCX wore a Nicole Kidman T-shirt?
For someone whose discography doesn’t extend much farther beyond a few movie musicals, Nicole Kidman sure has the pop world in a chokehold.
