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Nicole Kidman has revealed an unusual childhood experience that, years later, helped her feel surprisingly prepared for the more graphic parts of filming her new drama Scarpetta — including learning exactly how to ‘stick her fingers’ inside a corpse.
The upcoming Prime Video series adapts Patricia Cornwell’s hugely popular forensic thriller novels. Kidman plays Kay Scarpetta, a former Chief Medical Examiner drawn back into the job when a familiar serial killer appears to be active again.
With a cast that includes Jamie Lee Curtis and Bobby Cannavale, the show doesn’t shy away from the darker realities of the work. That means Kidman’s character spends plenty of time around bodies, injuries, and other unsettling evidence.
But Kidman says the blood and gore didn’t trigger the kind of squeamish reaction many might expect. In fact, she’s explained she was exposed to the realities of medical procedures early on — including witnessing an autopsy when she was young, after her parents insisted she watch educational material.
Speaking to USA Today, the Australian-American actor described how her parents, Anthony and Janelle — a clinical psychologist and a nursing instructor — used to set her and her sister down in front of medical training films.
Those instructional videos, designed for students, sometimes featured operations and other graphic imagery. While many children would have been horrified, Kidman says it ultimately made her more comfortable with the realities of the human body — something that proved useful when she later needed to perform autopsy work on screen.
She told the publication: “That’s how I learned so much about life is they would go, ‘Watch this medical film.’ We’d be like − my sister (younger sister Antonia Kidman) and I’d be like, ‘You’re kidding!’
“So I don’t have a fear of blood or anything. So when I learned to do the autopsies, say, I was just like, ‘OK, teach me.’”
That willingness to learn apparently carried through to the production itself. Series creator Elizabeth Sarnoff has described how Kidman approached the technical side of the role when a real forensic medical examiner was brought in to advise on authenticity.
According to Sarnoff, Kidman was coached on everything from handling tools to physically examining the body, as the team aimed to meet the expectations of Cornwell’s large readership ahead of the show’s March 11 release.
“So I really just thought about what’s the best story we can tell?,” she told the publication. “What is the best story to illuminate the inner lives of these characters and how can we do it so that it’s both a mystery that’s exciting, but also an emotional drama that you find yourself getting sucked into?”
Curtis, now 67, also discussed the emotional foundations of the two leading characters, noting that both Scarpetta and Dorothy experience the loss of a father at a young age — a shared history that informs how they move through the world.
She said: “What that does and how that shapes people and what path that sends them down is very evident here. Obviously Dorothy is acting out from that death and that experience.”
Kidman added that Scarpetta’s drive is tied to something deeper than career ambition — a need to understand, measure, and contain the unknowable.
But Kidman chimed in: “And Scarpetta wants control over death. And that’s something that I discovered from the medical examiner, also obviously from the novels, (about) why do you choose to become a medical examiner.
“That is a particular choice. And the motivation of that, deep inside, which seems to be similar (for) a lot of medical examiners is the idea of accuracy and control over death, knowing why or how.
Reflecting on her own grief, she continued: “I almost relate to that. I lost my father [in 2014] and my main thing was finding out why. I lost him very suddenly to a heart attack, but I wanted to know why, and it became an obsession.
“So I get why Kay chooses to do the job because it gives her a sense of control over something that is completely uncontrollable.”