Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Netflix
However, in the end, it all came down to whether Kidman would do it or not, as the scene wouldn’t have worked without her. While the Oscar-winner eventually agreed, she did put up a bit of a fight too.
“Nicole came to set and said, ‘Look, I can’t. My dress is too tight, I can’t dance,'” Bier, who previously directed Kidman on HBO’s “The Undoing,” said.
Kidman said that Bier put her foot down and insisted that the dance go ahead. “She ignored me and said, ‘Get out there! Dance!'”
Only Liev Schreiber, who plays Kidman’s character’s husband, was particularly excited about the scene. He said that while everyone was complaining on the group chat, he was busy learning the moves.
“I was the only one who wanted to do it, and I’m hardly in it,” Schreiber said. “I worked for three weeks on that dance. Barely in it! Like two seconds.”
Despite their protests, the dreaded dance didn’t turn out to be such a problem.
Instead, it marked the end of the cast’s time filming the show together and seems to be something none of them will forget.
“It was the last day that we had shot together, and we had gone on this entire journey,” Eve Hewson, who plays bride-to-be Amelia Sacks in the series, said.
Since production was interrupted by the SAG-AFTRA strike last year, she added, it was a “yearlong process of trying to finish this show. And so our last day together as a group was doing that dance.”
The scene was mapped out by Dua Lipa’s choreographer of choice and featured some of Taylor Swift’s backup dancers
Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Netflix
Dua Lipa’s renowned choreographer, Charm La’Donna, put together the moves for the dance.
La’Donna, who has also worked with Kendrick Lamar, Rosalía, and Selena Gomez, told Glamour that her aim with the dance was “to create something that the entire cast could enjoy, like a dance you might join in at a party.”
Bier told the official Netflix companion site Tudum: “It puts the show in a very definite space of, ‘This is a slightly heightened reality, and as an audience, you can allow yourself to have fun and enjoy it.’ There was something very joyful about having everybody doing it.”
Kidman said that the cast also ended up having extra support in the form of professional backup dancers who had previously worked with Taylor Swift.
It turned out that not all of the cast knew that small detail.
“No wonder I couldn’t get on camera,” Schreiber said.