A film adaptation of the best-selling memoir by Garrard Conley, Boy Erased tells the story of nineteen-year-old Jared Eamons, the only son of a Baptist minister and his wife. Jared enjoys an open and loving relationship with his family who live in Arkansas, a southern US state bordering Mississippi and Tennessee. After a traumatic incident occurs at school, however, Jared admits to his parents that he has feelings for men. As homosexuality is considered sinful by their religion, the Eamons agree that Jared should enroll on a twelve-day gay conversion therapy assessment programme in Memphis. There the intelligent teenager experiences the intensely isolating effects of a misguided and psychologically dangerous programme, which seems designed to distance its clients from their families, society and ultimately themselves, rather than help them feel they belong.
Based on the memoir by Garrard Conley, directed by Joel Edgerton and set in the American Deep South, Boy Erased tells the story of Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges), a Baptist pastor’s son who becomes conflicted about his sexuality. After a traumatic incident at college ends up in him opening up to his parents Marshall and Nancy (Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman), Jared willingly enrolls in a conversion therapy programme that promises to ‘cure’ him of homosexuality. As the weeks go by, he endures a strange series of workshops combining bullying, humiliation and psychological manipulation, which seek to distance him physically and psychologically from his family as well as his own true nature. Thanks to the unconditional love and support of his mother, Jared realises that to move on with his life he must first accept himself.
LOVE IN ACTION
Boy Erasedstars Lucas Hedges as Jared, and Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe as his parents Nancy and Marshall. Joel Edgerton directs the movie, and plays the role of Victor Sykes, the passive-aggressive chief therapist of the so-called Love In Action programme. When Edgerton first read Conley’s book, he was both moved and disturbed by it. Most revealing to him, he says, was its acknowledgement that conversion therapy, while condemned by human rights groups, may be born out of compassion rather than hatred, as the director explains.
Joel Edgerton (Australian accent): My feeling coming into the book was this is a hateful group of people that do hateful stuff. It wasn’t that, it was more complicated. What I got out of it was this understanding that the reason it exists is because the motivation for sending people there and the reason why the infrastructure exists is because it is born out of love and the need to care for people.
HER ESSENCE
Nicole Kidman plays Nancy Eamons, a smart southern belle who is caught between her love for her son and her respect for her church. Conley’s real mother Martha is a powerful presence in his book. Kidman describes the approach she used to play such a fundamental role.
Nicole Kidman (Australian accent): I go in through my emotional responses to the story and to my child, because I've got to come through it as a mother and feel the things that I relate to her on, and then find the way in which I'm going to portray her. When it's a real person I don't really want to meet them too early. It's more about finding my truth so that I can come through that and then morph into her and really find her essence.
CONSTANT SUPPORT
When Martha finally visited the set, Kidman was overwhelmed by her warmth and support. She immediately understood how much Martha’s strength had helped her son stay true to himself.
Nicole Kidman: She visited the set halfway through, and I was nervous, but she was so loving and she brought her sister as well and once they started encouraging me and [were] deeply affectionate towards me, I was like, ‘okay, now I want you here all the time’.
the many faces of nicole kidman
Born in Hawaii in 1967 to Australian parents, Nicole Kidman is one of the world’s most arresting actors. Brought up in Sydney, she landed her first major role as a teenager in the hit TV show Five Mile Creek.
Kidman has grown up on screen, while remaining resolutely guarded about her off-screen life. After coming to international attention with the psychological thriller Dead Calm, she made the transition to Hollywood where she played leading lady to Tom Cruise in the sports action drama film Days of Thunder. It was the first of three films she was feature in with her then-spouse, with Far and Away and Stanley Kubrick’s erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut.
In the 1990s Kidman played a serious of intriguing roles that were to take her career in a new direction. They included lead in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, based on the book by Henry James, the icy Grace in Alejandro Amenábar's gothic horror The Others, and a woman hungry for fame in the black comedy To Die For.
Kidman won an Oscar for a role she was almost unrecognisable in, wearing a false nose to play the writer Virginia Wolf in the acclaimed The Hours. She followed up by playing another Grace in Danish director Lars von Trier’s experimental film Dogville, and a beautiful widow whose late husband is reincarnated as a young boy in the supernatural thriller Birth.
More recently, Kidman featured as an adoptive mother in Lion, a strict headmistress46 of an all-girls school during the American Civil War in Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled, and a journalist in Bombshell, a movie about sexual harassment at Fox News. She also gave a terrific performance as a corrupt detective in the crime drama Destroyer.
Kidman is now, at 53, still very much in demand. After the success of her role as an abused wife in the Emmy-winning TV series Big Little Lies, Kidman is set to headline in Nine Perfect Strangers based on a book by the same author, Liane Moriarty. Most imminently, watch out for Kidman this autumn in The Undoing, a drama miniseries also starring Hugh Grant.