Nicole Kidman’s Late Night Reading Habit Proves She’s Just Like Us

Nicole Kidman is Just Like Us when it comes to reading — especially when husband Keith Urban is sleeping beside her.

“I do read before I go to sleep a lot of times. It’s a really good way for me to wind down,” Kidman, 57, shared with author Elin Hilderbrand on the “Books, Beach, & Beyond” podcast episode released on Wednesday, September 11. “Then if I wake up at 3 a.m., I am one of those people that has a reading light and pops it on, and I read.”

The actress told Hilderbrand about waking up in the middle of the night and picking up a book. (Kidman stars in the Netflix’s buzzy six-episode adaptation of Hilderbrand’s novel The Perfect Couple.)

“I heard a really interesting analysis of the way we sleep,” Kidman continued. “Everyone places so much emphasis on sleeping. Eight hours straight, you must get eight hours. But there was a time, it used to be you’d wake at two or three sometimes and people would read. They’d sit by the fireplace and read.”

She added, “You’d sleep in increments of four or five hours and read a little bit and then go back to sleep. That’s kind of my rhythm.”

When the Oscar winner does wake up in the middle of the night to read, she takes care not to disturb her slumbering husband, using “the little reading light that you can clip on to your book.”

“I was given that as a present,” she continued. “It’s fabulous because it doesn’t wake up Keith. So, I’m not putting the big light on, and I’m not having to get out even though sometimes I will go into another room. But the little reading light, one of the best gifts.”

As for what type of book Kidman chooses, it depends on her mood.

“Because of my job, it can be very, like it can enter my dreams, a lot of my work,” she shared. “So I’ve got to balance with light novels so that I’m not sort of disturbed before I can sleep.”

Kidman is no stranger to the book world as she’s starred in a many book-to-movie adaptations over the years. She won an Oscar playing Virginia Woolf in 2002’s The Hours, adapted from Michael Cunningham‘s award-winning novel. And, most recently, Hildebrand’s The Perfect Couple, which premiered on September 5 and follows the story of the Winbury family wedding weekend that gets uprooted after a body is discovered on the beach.

Kidman plays Winbury matriarch and bestselling novelist (another book tie-in!) Greer, opposite Liev Schreiber, who plays her husband Tag. Kidman got close friend Naomi Watts’ permission to be married to Schreiber onscreen. (Watts and Schreiber were together from 2005 to 2016.)

Schreiber joked to Entertainment Weekly that he “heard a story” where Kidman “asked Naomi first if it was OK” to be his love interest. Kidman responded, “Of course!”