When Nicole Kidman won her 2003 best-actress Oscar for The Hours, presenter Denzel Washington announced her name with three introductory words: “By a nose.” It was an amusing reference to the prosthetic Kidman wore to play Virginia Woolf in the film, a decision Oscar-winning costume designer Ann Roth is still taking credit for—and being asked about—20 years later.

“I said to her, ‘I can’t honestly put a 1917 hat on your head with that nose,’” Roth, who appears in a pivotal scene of the newly released Barbie, said of Kidman in a recent interview with The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. “I made her a nose with a nose maker in England, and it took hours every morning for them to get the damn thing on.”

The lore of the fake nose goes something like this: Production on Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film began shortly after Kidman’s public breakup with Tom Cruise. Seeing that “the star was in a fragile state,” as The New York Times put it in 2003, Roth declared, “We have to do something about your face.” That something was the nose—a “jolt, a kick-start” to Kidman’s performance as Woolf, Roth told the Los Angeles Times that same year. It was one meant to facilitate Kidman’s portrayal, Roth said, not distract from it.

Michael Cunningham, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller on which the film is based, told Vanity Fair’s David Canfield that “pretty much everyone was nervous about the nose—the idea of sabotaging Nicole’s beauty.” That included then Hollywood powerhouses Scott Rudin, who produced the project, and Harvey Weinstein, whose Miramax production company helped finance it. Roth now tells the Times that while Rudin supported Roth’s idea for the fake nose, Weinstein adamantly rejected it. “I paid a million dollars for that girl, and no one knows who she is,” Roth recalled Weinstein snapping. 

Weinstein apparently sent an executive to the London set to convince Kidman that the nose was a mistake. According to Dowd, the exec was foiled by security guards Rudin employed at every entrance of the production. “I don’t think anybody really liked him,” Roth said of Weinstein, who’s currently serving a 23-year prison sentence for rape and a criminal sexual act. Rudin, a friend of Roth’s who has been largely out of the spotlight since a damning 2021 exposé—which accused him of abusive behavior by former employees; at the time, he declined to comment on the claims—made a rare public comment for Dowd’s piece. “She’s younger than any young artist I know,” he said of Roth. “She’s been on top of her game for 65 years.” (Vanity Fair has reached out to Rudin for additional comment.)

As for that headline-making nose, discourse about its presence only bolstered Kidman’s awards chances. “Underneath that nose, she’s giving one of the great acting performances, so who cares?” the film’s screenwriter David Hare told VF. Cunningham added, “In some parallel dimension, the movie went down over Nicole Kidman’s plastic nose. It didn’t happen in this dimension.”