Nicole Kidman Had to Drop Out of PANIC ROOM After an On-Set Injury and Jodie Foster Stepped in With One Week to Prepare
David Fincher’s 2002 thriller Panic Room is one of those movies that I stop to watch no matter what part of the movie it’s on. It’s perfectly balanced with relationships, tension, tight dialogue, drama, and the cool camera shots that Fincher fans are used to seeing in his films. But it almost didn’t come together the way we know it.
The film originally starred Academy Award-winning actress Nicole Kidman in the lead role of Meg Altman, a woman who has recently gotten divorced and has moved into a beautiful new house with her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart). The home comes with a panic room, which the mother and daughter have to use when a group of men break into their home. Without a way to call out from the room, and Sarah having Type 1 diabetes and needing access to her meds, everyone involved is on a ticking clock.
Production had begun on the film, when 18 days in, Kidman re-injured her knee after hurting it while making Moulin Rouge! the year before. X-rays revealed she'd now suffered a hairline fracture, and she was told she needed to be off her feet to heal, so Kidman had to drop out.
At the same time, Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster happened to become available because a film she was about to direct, ironically enough, had to be shut down when its star, Russell Crowe, suffered an injury.
She stepped into Kidman’s Panic Room role with only a week’s preparation, and had to perform it on a set that had been designed for the much taller Kidman. And she was pregnant! Big sweaters and a few post-baby reshoots got them around that, though, and the rest is history. I love Nicole Kidman, and I’m sure she was have been great in the movie, but Foster was fantastic, and I love her performance, so it all worked out.
via: Buzzfeed