Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron reunite 12 years after The Paperboy to play lovers in a movie, this time with a comedic twist, in the Netflix movie A Family Affair, starring alongside Joey King, directed by Richard Lagravenese (Beautiful Creatures, P.S. I Love You). Having worked with her in the past, Efron was flattered that Kidman specifically wanted to collaborate again.
“I think Nicole knows that of course if she’s in, I’m in, but I think she called me and was like, ‘Are you in? Because then I’m in,’ and I was like, very flattering. I was blown away,” Efron told Yahoo Canada.
“Then on top of that, we got the icing on the cake, which was Joey. So I knew between the three of us we were just going to have a blast and it ended up being way cooler than anything I ever dreamed of.”
King plays 24-year-old Zara, who works as a personal assistant to an egotistical and rude movie star, Chris Cole (Efron). Chris is the kind of movie star who makes headlines like, “Exclusive pic! World’s greatest abs!” The only reason Zara has really stayed in the job is because Chris has said he’s setting her up to run his company.
“There’s some things in there I was able to kind of draw off and handle in completely the worst way, which was fun,” Efron said about playing a move star in A Family Affair. “It was fun to like exercise that, I guess. … Exercise the demons.”
Zara’s mom Brooke (Kidman) is a famous writer who’s suffering from writer’s block, and hasn’t dated since her husband, Zara’s father, died a decade earlier. When she meets Chris there are some instant sparks, which leads to Zara walking in on her boss and her mother hooking up in her mother’s bedroom.
Throughout the film Zara, Brooke and Chris have to navigate what the possibility of this relationship means for their personal and professional lives.
While it’s easy to make comparisons to other age-gap rom-coms pushing against the stigma that an older woman with a younger man is more scandalous than an older man with a younger women, like the Prime Video hit The Idea of You, A Family Affair goes significantly farther in the comedy department.
Much of that is thanks to King, particularly the one critical physical comedy moment when Zara first sees her mom and Chris together.
“That was a very fun scene, it also was a very technical scene,” King explained. “I wanted it to be just right and because there was a bit of a stunt involved with it, I remember doing it and then watching it back a couple times like, ‘No that still looks fake. No, let’s try this way.’ So it was really fun to kind of just like try to nail it to make it look really real.”
“One of the best parts was Nicole and Zac stayed, even when the camera wasn’t on them, to watch me and support me. … It was really cute.”
Efron also praised King’s “impressive” acting in that scene in particular.
“It was impressive because she really did all of it,” Efron added. “You had to hit your head like six times and every time you made a thud, like with your foot, it was really impressive physical comedy.”
“Nicole and I were so blown away. … You also nailed it like the first take, but being the perfectionist you are you did like five more, and they just got better and better and better.”
Something that’s worth noting is that A Family Affair stays on track to show Zara’s commitment to her career, we never actually hear about her romantic life at all. It’s a move by writer Carrie Solomon that still feels fresh for the genre.
“I love that Zara doesn’t have a romantic link up in this movie,” King said. “We can focus on her journey, and her really emotional journey with her boss and her mom.”
“She’s going through a really interesting time with her relationship with her mom, and with someone who’s, yes her boss, but one of her closest people in her life too.”
