Nicole Kidman Joins Riley Keough in Hollywood’s 'Weird' New Side Hustle

Everyone needs a side hustle, even Nicole Kidman.

The 58-year-old actress, who already has multiple jobs in the entertainment industry, is learning a new skill. Kidman revealed the news at the University of San Francisco’s Silk Speaker Series on April 11 that she is “learning to be a death doula,” per the San Francisco Chronicle.

She isn’t shying away from the narrative that the pursuit “sounds a little weird,” but she was inspired to help others after her mother, Janelle Ann Kidman, passed away in September 2024.

“As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide,” she continued. “Between my sister and I, we have so many children and our careers and our work, and wanting to take care of her because my father wasn’t in the world anymore, and that’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.'”

Kidman isn’t the only one in Hollywood who was moved to train as a death doula after losing a loved one. In 2021, Riley Keough shared that she completed training from The Art of Death Midwifery course after losing her younger brother, Benjamin Keough. He died by suicide in July 2020 after a battle with depression and addiction.

“I think it’s so important to be educated on conscious dying and death the way we educate ourselves on birth and conscious birthing,” Keough explained to her Instagram followers. “We prepare ourselves so rigorously for the entrance and have no preparation for our exit. So I’m so grateful for this community and to be able to contribute what I can.”

If you think Kidman and Keough are a little too woo-woo about their death doula pursuit, think again. It’s becoming a wellness trend embraced by Hamnet director Chloé Zhao and The Office star Rainn Wilson, too.

“In the modern world, when death is no longer seen as a natural part of life — because now it’s about staying alive as long as we can — there’s almost shame around death,” Zhao told The New York Times in January about her U.K. death doula training. She pursued the course after directing Hamnet, which focused on the 1596 death of William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, Hamnet, from the bubonic plague.

“You can see that the grief of losing a loved one doesn’t change,” she summed up. “However, the societal understanding of death and the space it gives to grief and how it’s embedded in the culture and the medicalization of death have shifted so much.”

Now, we are just waiting for Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop to get on board — that’s when you know Hollywood is fully behind the death doula trend.

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