Big Little Lies was conceived as a miniseries but those involved said: “Oh, this doesn't end here.” The critical and public success was as overwhelming as her time at the 2017 Emmy Awards, where Nicole Kidman won as best actress, Laura Dern and Alexander Skarsgard as supporting characters, Jean-Marc Vallée in direction and the statuette for best miniseries. . This allowed them to return with a second season in 2019, two years later, and since then there has been no reliable news about the production of new episodes. According to Kidman, who not only stars in the series with Reese Witherspoon but both are also executive producers, they are underway.
The Australian broke the news while being interviewed at an event. When she was asked about her favorite character of all the ones she had played in her career, she first said that it was her participation as Satine in Moulin Rouge but that she felt it was Celeste in Big little lies. She was grateful that, at a time when she had just become a mother and assumed that the industry would lose interest in her, both she and Witherspoon were met with public interest, which turned the dramatic thriller into a phenomenon. “We will bring you a third season, I just wanted to let you know,” she revealed to the audience.
Big Little Lies, which is based on a novel by Liane Moriarty, focused on the dynamics of mothers at a nursery school in Monterey, a wealthy area of California. Five very different women met there and found themselves in a tense situation: Renata's daughter (Laura Dern) had been attacked by a boy in class.
This affected Celeste (Kidman), a lawyer who had left her professional career to focus on raising children; Madeline (Witherspoon), the gossip queen; Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz), the new wife of Madeline's ex, with a more relaxed attitude; and finally Jane (Shailene Woodley), a newcomer to Monterey without the purchasing power of the others and a secret agenda related to a past trauma.
Reese Witherspoon, who already had experience as a producer, approached Kidman about co-adapting Moriarty's novel. They hired screenwriter David E. Kelley, a veteran who had created series like Ally McBeal and The Lawyer, and director Jean-Marc Vallée, with whom the legal blonde had worked on Wild Soul, which also starred Laura Dern.
It is estimated that for the first season, Kidman earned $350,000 per episode and Witherspoon approximately $250,000, but, having not signed contracts for a continuation and with HBO's obsession with bringing them back, both earned more than a million dollars for each episode. of the second season. The rest of the actresses also benefited: Dern and Woodley started to earn $500,000 per episode while Kravitz negotiated more than $400,000. Meryl Streep, who signed on in the second season as Kidman's mother-in-law, earned a check for $800,000 per episode.
The second season did not have the same consensus, partly due to problems behind the cameras. Jean-Marc Vallée was unable to participate as director and Kidman and Witherspoon entrusted the director's work to Andrea Arnold. The result, however, did not convince them: he had made a much more indie and intimate approach that did not fit with the tone of the first and Vallée ended up in the editing room, trying to bring the fiction together.
Now, after rumors about the tension between Kidman and Witherspoon during the second season, the waters seem to have returned to normal, after a first season that turned Kidman, Dern, Kravitz and Witherspoon into an example of friendship and sisterhood in a Hollywood of posturing.
In August, Kidman and Witherspoon posted a photo together on Instagram. “A great night with my friend,” the Australian uploaded. In September, Dern and Kravitz met up for dinner with Taylor Swift in New York. And, this same month of October, these two actresses met Witherspoon in Los Angeles. These meetings indicate that, indeed, the third season could be a reality.
Of course, we will have to find a replacement worthy of Vallée, a fundamental part of Big Little Lies for his narrative pulse and musical mentality: on Christmas Day 2021 he died at the age of 58.
