Prestige TV certainly owes a debt to Nicole Kidman. The Oscar-winning star of Moulin Rouge! and The Hours was a regular on Australian TV in the ’80s and, after a 28-year hiatus from the small screen—a considerable period, though shorter than that of many of her peers in the industry—she returned with a flurry of shows that dominated water cooler conversations: Big Little Lies, Top of the Lake: China Girl, The Undoing, and Nine Perfect Strangers, all of which were released in the space of just four years. Now, Variety has revealed that the prolific actor will be back with yet another buzzy series—and, deservingly, her role is a meaty one.
In Paramount+’s upcoming drama Lioness, she’s set to play CIA operative Kaitlyn Meade. The show itself is based on the real-life CIA Lioness Program, which is made up of female U.S. Marines who were able to conduct on-the-ground searches for women in Iraq and Afghanistan without violating local customs (which prevented men from touching local women), while also gathering intelligence.
The show’s log line states that it will follow “Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira), a rough-around-the-edges but passionate young Marine recruited to join the CIA’s Lioness Engagement Team to help bring down a terrorist organization from within.” Kidman, meanwhile, will lend support as “the CIA’s senior supervisor who has had a long career of playing the politics game. She must juggle the trappings of being a woman in the high-ranking intelligence community, a wife that longs for the attention she herself can’t even give, and a mentor to someone veering suspiciously close to the same rocky road she’s found herself on.”
Kidman will also serve as an executive producer, while her other co-stars will include the likes of Zoe Saldaña, Jill Wagner, Dave Annable, LaMonica Garrett, and Austin Hébert. The best news of all, though, is that Lioness’s creator and showrunner is none other than Taylor Sheridan, the Oscar-nominated writer of Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River, who also created Yellowstone and its spin-offs 1883 and 1923. If he brings the same grit, heart, and humanity to this new project, we’re sure to be in for a scorcher.