Liane Moriarty, the author of best-selling novel Big Little Lies, has revealed how her first meeting with Nicole Kidman went down.
Reese Witherspoon approached Nicole Kidman to assist her in getting the rights to the Australian book and Kidman organised a meeting with Liane at a Sydney cafe. When Liane showed up to the Darlinghurt coffee shop, she discovered that it was closed.
Liane revealed her thought process of that moment by recounting to 60 Minutes: “I though to myself, ‘I wonder if they’ve closed the cafe just for her (Kidman)’.”
She recounted walking around the back of the establishment and spotting a few staff members. She then asked them, “Are you closed? And they said, ‘Yes’. And so I looked at them and said, ‘But are you closed for everyone?’ And they said, ‘Yes. We’re closed for everyone. Get out.'”
Liane added that they eventually found somewhere else to meet and that Kidman was “lovely and warm and very down to earth.”
Kidman backed up the story to 60 Minutes and added, “We were just like two Australian women discussing our lives.”
In the meeting, Liane agreed to the sell the rights of the book to Kidman and Witherspoon. The television series was made starring the two actresses in lead roles alongside Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern and Zoë Kravitz.
Big Little Lies went on to win eight Emmys and four Golden Globes. The series helped Liana gain recognition in her home country of Australia.
“Of course you want to be recognised in your own country,” Moriarty said. “Maybe it just makes the success sweeter that I had to do so many events where there was nobody in the audience.”
The mother-of-two was inspired to write the novel after her sister Jaclyn published her first novel, she explained, “I say I felt envy, and I also felt a sense of rage. But the rage was really against myself because Jackie had gone ahead and achieved our childhood dream. And I hadn’t even tried.”
Her other sister Nicola is also a successful novelist.
14 million of Liane’s books have now been sold. Kidman has also already gained the rights to new release Perfect Strangers as well as Liane’s second book The Last Anniversary.
Kidman has said that Liane is proof that “you can do this, you can sit in your house in the suburbs of the north shoe and write a novel that changes your life.”
