Nicole Kidman and Natalie Portman have never made a film together, but they have both played the same real scientist. Kidman, an Academy Award winner for The Hours, took on the chemist Rosalind Franklin in a West End stage production in 2015. Portman, who won her own Academy Award for Black Swan, plays Franklin in a film opening in December 2026, more than a decade after she first mentioned Franklin’s name while preparing for an entirely different role.
Kidman has also spent eight years building a public record on hiring women directors, a pledge Portman gets unfairly measured against even though she never made an equivalent promise herself. Both women, in different ways, have also become part of a newer argument, over whether studios will keep hiring real performers once artificial ones are cheap enough to build.
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The scientist both of them ended up playing
Kidman took the role a year after her father, biochemist Antony Kidman, died. She has spoken about the connection: the play’s final preview at the Noel Coward Theatre fell on the exact anniversary of his death, and during rehearsals she asked to hold the real Photograph 51, the X ray image at the center of the story, at the King’s College archives rather than work from a copy. Critics noticed. The Guardian wrote that her performance captured the excitement of scientific discovery itself.
Portman’s connection to Franklin goes back further than the casting itself. While preparing to play the fictional astrophysicist Jane Foster for 2011’s Thor, she has said she read biographies of real female scientists who were denied credit for their work, Franklin among them. A performance built for a comic book adaptation ended up drawing on the same woman she is now playing for real. Tom Hooper, who is directing the new film, says Portman brings “fierce intelligence, intensity, brilliance and wit” to the role.
Kidman’s pledge, and the record Portman doesn’t get credit for
At the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, Kidman told the New Zealand Herald she would work with a female director once every eighteen months. She had statistics ready to explain why: only 4.2 percent of the previous year’s major films had been directed by women, and just 183 of roughly 4,000 television episodes had a woman behind the camera. By 2025, according to Variety, that number had grown to 27 female directors across eight years, once projects still in development were counted. Per Saari, who helped found her production company Blossom Films, once called her “a doer, not a talker.” She has sought out several of these collaborations herself, including Lulu Wang, whom she approached to direct Expats after watching The Farewell.
Portman’s own record gets far less credit. In 2020, she wore a Dior cape to the Oscars embroidered with the names of directors passed over that year, and the actress Rose McGowan publicly dismissed the gesture as hollow. Six years later, at Sundance in January 2026, promoting The Gallerist, directed by Cathy Yan, Portman made a version of the same argument again, naming the specific films she felt had gone unrecognized:
- Sorry Baby
- Left Handed Girl
- Hedda
- The Testament of Ann Lee
She is also set to work with Lena Dunham on a new film for Netflix. A running tally and an embroidered dress are both, in the end, ways of making support visible rather than proof of what the films turned out to be, even if only one of them tends to get called honest.
When the competition stopped being human
In 2025, an AI studio called Particle6 introduced a computer generated performer named Tilly Norwood, built, according to its founder, to eventually rival the box office pull of Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman. Portman had already put words to that unease more than a year earlier. She told Vanity Fair in February 2024 that “there’s a good chance I won’t have a job soon,” adding that she wasn’t sure if that counted as a threat or simply where the industry was headed.
Kidman’s version of the same worry runs in a different direction, toward memory rather than employment. She told Vogue Australia in 2024 that she was not certain what would survive of her work if AI altered it after the fact, a concern that resurfaced in 2026 while she was filming Scarpetta, a series built around AI technology designed to simulate the voices of the dead. Portman’s own answer arrives in December, when Photograph 51 opens and she finally plays the scientist she first read about more than a decade earlier, while preparing for an unrelated part.
Common questions
Did Nicole Kidman and Natalie Portman ever work together?
No. Despite more than two decades of overlapping careers and some of the same award shows, the two have never appeared in a film or television project together.
Why did Kidman take on the role of Rosalind Franklin?
She has said it was partly a tribute to her father, biochemist Antony Kidman, who died in 2014. The play’s final preview fell on the exact anniversary of his death.
Is Portman’s Photograph 51 based on the same play Kidman performed?
Yes. Portman stars as Franklin in the film adaptation, directed by Tom Hooper and based on Anna Ziegler’s play, the same production Kidman appeared in on stage. It is due for release in December 2026.
How many female directors has Kidman worked with?
At least 27 as of 2025, either as an actor or producer, according to Variety, a figure that has grown since she first pledged in 2017 to work with a female director every eighteen months.
