The Women

For the five returning stars of BIG LITTLE LIES, the sisterly bond isn’t just made for TV

- Laura Brown

Big Little Lies is a Very Big Deal. It is an epic, insanely entertaining, tremendously acted hit. It features an ensemble of women, from longtime movie stars to burning younger talents who are each Big Deals on their own (oh, and coming up in Season 2, Meryl Streep). But it represents more than that. It is, frankly, a triumph for the ladies. BLL is great work done by great women, with respect and craft, the conscious sharing of opportunity, and, most significantly, very real friendships.

The lives of the cast—Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, and Zoë Kravitz—have overlapped in myriad ways. Nicole and Reese have a production partnership (Big Little Lies is their brainchild). Reese starred with Laura in Wild. Laura starred with Shailene in The Fault in Our Stars. Shailene starred with Zoë in Divergent. Nicole has known Zoë since she dated her father, Lenny Kravitz, 16 years ago. And so it goes. These women’s relationships run much deeper than “ensemble cast”; rather, they have influenced and enriched each other’s lives.

It’s quite the confluence: intense success, intense celebrity, intense friendship. But I wanted to talk to Nicole, Reese, Laura, Shailene, and Zoë about something else—ambition. Ambition remains, curiously, a loaded word, and in conversation, some embraced it more than others. Their answers are wildly different and often surprising, revealing a desire for success, sure, for visibility and political change, of course, but for love more than anything else.

Reese

Q A

LAURA BROWN: You’ve talked a lot about ambition, and I love how you speak about it. Everyone has distinct ideas of it. What’s yours?