Nicole Kidman and cast talk about their roles in ‘Holland’
Nicole Kidman unveils thrilling details about her new Prime Video movie “Holland” (streaming now) with the cast.
Spoiler alert! We’re dishing about the thriller “Holland” (streaming now on Prime Video), which has more twists and turns than a creepy train set. If you’d like to avoid picking your tulips before they’ve bloomed, come back after you’re seen it.
All aboard the crazy train!
Nicole Kidman stars in “Holland” as Nancy Vandergroot, the kind of woman you might envy (and not just because she has Kidman’s flawless complexion). The life skills teacher is a devoted mom to her son Harry (Jude Hill) and wife to a successful optometrist Fred (Matthew Macfadyen). She lives in the idyllic, Dutch-influenced town of Holland, Michigan, which gives a no-need-to-lock-your-door vibe. But below the surface, Nancy is dying.
“My life is like carbon monoxide,” she tells Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal), the woodshop teacher she’s in love with. “It’s so sleepy and comfortable, I don’t even know that I’m suffocating.” Nancy feels like she isn’t living, “just existing.”
Seated between Macfadyen and García Bernal for an interview, Kidman says she loves “how relatable that was in terms of people at different times in their lives.”
Nancy “presents this very bubbly thing,” Kidman adds. “But there’s so many twists and turns in this, which is the thing that I loved when I was reading it. I didn’t know what was going to happen next.”
Nancy enlists Dave’s help when she suspects Fred is having an affair. If only! Fred is actually a serial killer who memorializes his slayings by creating replicas of his victims’ homes in his creepy train set village.
“Really, life is very complex,” García Bernal says. “Whenever there’s this construct of many aspects of perfection, there’s always something behind that. It’s not real.”
“And that’s why it’s exciting when something comes in and sort of explodes,” Kidman says − in this case, life as Nancy knows it.
By director Mimi Cave’s design, you might have questions about the film’s mysterious ending. Here’s what Cave and the cast had to say.
Is Fred dead, finally?
If your nervous system did celebratory backflips when you thought Dave fatally stabbed Fred after finding out Fred is a murderer, you’re not alone. Like so many villains before him, Fred returned from the dead (and the lake where Dave left him) to Holland to be with his wife and son. As Fred was driving the trio home, Nancy pretended to go along with the plan, only so Harry could flee to safety.
She then shot Fred in the face, but that didn’t kill him, naturally. She had to beat him to death with a clog, a move that Kidman calls “crazy” in an “Isn’t that delicious?” way.
Viewers can rest assured Fred is actually dead, for real this time, Cave says.
“I wanted Nancy to not only literally be the one to create real safety for herself and her son − which is sort of like eliminating the murderer that she’s married to,” says Cave, laughing, “but also, symbolically. She’s finally arriving in her life, and she’s taking agency and action.”
‘Holland’: Nicole Kidman is embroiled in a Midwestern mystery
A bored Michigan woman (Nicole Kidman) begins to think her optometrist hubby (Matthew Macfadyen) might be living a double life in “Holland.”
‘Holland’ ending explained: Was any of it real?
At the end of “Holland,” audiences hear Nancy and Dave say that sometimes they question if any of the saga was even real. Well, was it?
Macfadyen loves the film’s “ambiguous and odd” conclusion. “It’s just great,” he says.
“Was it real?” Kidman asks her castmates.
“I don’t know,” García Bernal responds, causing Kidman to burst into laughter.
The director is less coy and hints that Dave could’ve been a figment of Nancy’s imagination.
“Maybe Dave was never there, maybe Nancy fantasized this whole relationship, and her fantasy was a catalyst toward the truth,” Cave says. “If you look back in the film, it actually makes a lot of sense.”
She encourages her audience to really analyze the facts given to them. “’Let me look at it from a few different angles, and I might find a different meaning or a different truth,’” she says.
The endings with room for interpretation are the kind that Cave enjoys most. “This storyteller is giving me options of the truth,” she says. “It’s an engaging way to entertain people and keep them thinking about something.”
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