This time last year, Nicole Kidman was working with Oscar-winning makeup artist Bill Corso, perfecting the sun-damaged, sleep-deprived complexion of the LAPD detective she’d play in “Destroyer,” developing a leathery look far and away removed from the 51-year-old actress’ own fair skin.

Seeing their mom in full makeup for the first time, Kidman’s daughters — Sunday, 10, and Fifi, 7 — reacted in the blunt way that kids that age do.

“They called me ‘granny,’?” Kidman remembers, laughing. “They’re like, ‘You’re our granny now.’ ”

Which got Kidman thinking. The girls’ school in Nashville, Tenn. — where Kidman, musician husband Keith Urban and their daughters live — was putting on a grandparents’ chocolate day. Both Kidman’s and Urban’s mothers live in Australia. So Kidman told her girls that’d she gladly don a wig and dress up and play their grandmother for the day.

Her idea was met with mortification.

“I thought it’d be kind of quirky and funny and make for a good story for when they were older,” Kidman says, curled up cross-legged on a couch on a recent weekend in Los Angeles. And here she adopts a shaky, old person’s voice. “ ‘Oh … hello Sunday! I’m here!’ And she’s just like, ‘Whatever you do, never, ever do that.’ So I won’t be dressing up as their granny — even though that’s what they called me!”

Kidman doesn’t exactly need to take on another part right now. She has two movies arriving in theaters over the next two weeks: “Destroyer,” for which she just earned her 13th Golden Globe nomination, opens in limited release on Christmas Day, and “Aquaman,” in which she plays the superhero’s mother, aka The Queen of Atlantis.

She can also currently be seen in the drama “Boy Erased,” winning strong reviews for portraying the supportive mother of a young man struggling to reconcile his sexuality with his evangelical upbringing.

It’s the extension of a remarkable run of roles that began with Kidman’s Oscar-nominated performance in the 2016 film “Lion” and continued last year with starring turns in Sofia Coppola’s remake of “The Beguiled” and Yorgos Lanthimos’ unsettling “The Killing of the Sacred Deer” and, of course, her work on the HBO series “Big Little Lies,” for which she won the Emmy, the SAG Award and the Golden Globe playing Celeste, a woman hiding the dark secret of domestic violence behind a flawless facade.

Kidman, however, isn’t one to shape illusions about her life or her career. She says she almost gave up acting a few years ago, following a disappointing time of making films such as “The Railway Man,” “Trespass” and “Before I Go to Sleep,” movies that were barely seen and, aside from Kidman’s acting, harshly reviewed. The low point came at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival when the audience greeted her Grace Kelly homage “Grace of Monaco” with boos and hisses. Kidman sobbed in her hotel room.

“It’s probably not great to talk about when you’re old, but you start out as flavor of the month and then you’re not; you have some things that work and some that don’t, and suddenly no one’s interested,” Kidman says. “Then it’s, ‘You’ve squandered or lost your talent.’ And that’s not true. It’s always there if you’re nourishing it. And that’s what I was doing. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating.”

Unlike Matthew McConaughey and his celebrated, self-labeled McConaissance of a few years ago, Kidman didn’t have the luxury of choice. Women in Hollywood don’t. She tried to find funding for projects she wanted to produce. She starred in a celebrated production of “Photograph 51” on the London stage. (“I was terrified no one was going to come,” she says. The entire 11-week run sold out.) And she tried to jump-start her film career.

“I wasn’t the first, second or third choice for ‘Lion,’ ” Kidman says. “(Director) Garth Davis was told not to cast me. That hurt. And Garth said, ‘No. That’s what I’m doing. I want to cast her.’ And he fought hard for me.”

“Destroyer” director Kusama has had her own ups and downs and appreciates the candor with which Kidman discusses her career.

“For her to be honest about feeling she was down in the dumps and not excited about her work is testament to her actual love for the art form,” Kusama says. “Because she just powered through those times. And I’m sure she had some really dark nights staring up at the ceiling, but it seems like that ebb and flow and the understanding that there’s good times and bad times really informs her work right now.”

Kidman remembers thinking that maybe she’d write or just focus completely on being a mom in Tennessee and finding a philanthropic path that would engage her creatively. Looking to vent, Kidman called her mother — a feminist who didn’t have the career she probably wanted and challenged her two daughters to reject societal expectations — and her mom repeated what she has always told her. “Do not give up your career.”

“And I remember saying, ‘I’m tired. I want to,’ ” Kidman remembers. “And she said, ‘Keep your toe in the water. You’ll want that.’ I’m so glad she said it. Because I’d probably be sad and I would grieve it if I had stopped.”