Few actors have been typecast as often as Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. She's the ice princess. He's Prince Charming.
In "The Undoing," a six-part whodunit premiering Sunday on HBO, neither star ignores those labels; they pounce on them.
Kidman, who also served as an executive producer, plays Grace Fraser, a Manhattan therapist whose unflappable couch-side manner comforts her tony clients. Grant is Jonathan Fraser, a quick-witted doctor who makes Patch Adams look like Marcus Welby. The pair flirt and joke with each other so easily you'll think you've stumbled into a romantic comedy.
But HBO has no interest in mimicking the Hallmark Channel. The playhouse quickly gets torn down. There's a murder. Betrayal. Shocking confessions.
Jonathan's charm is revealed to be a manipulative tool that masks a serious case of runaway ego. As one colleague describes him, "He never got the Godplex memo."
Grace discovers she has deliberately put up a facade to avoid the personal traumas she pries so smoothly from her patients. She thinks her mind is stronger than her heart. She's wrong.
"The great thing about this, the thing that really drew me to it, is that it's so twisty and nothing is what it seems," Kidman said in January during a conference with TV critics in Los Angeles. "The psychology of this series is we choose to see certain things but also that everyone has secrets. They just do."
For Grant, it's the latest opportunity to have some fun with the mold he created in date-night classics like "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Love Actually."
