The 'Nine Perfect Strangers' actress has landed in hot water after she's allowed by Hong Kong government to skip the quarantine when arriving from Australia for TV shoot.
- August 20, 2021
AceShowbiz - Nicole Kidman has sparked a backlash in Hong Kong after skipping the country's strict COVID-19 quarantine to shoot the Amazon series "Expats".
According to reports, Kidman was exempted from the city's 7-day hotel quarantine for vaccinated people arriving from Australia, despite a surge in delta variant cases prompting a lockdown in Sydney, where she flew in from.
The actress reportedly took a private jet from Sydney to Hong Kong on 12 August (21) and after "mounting public pressure" to explain Kidman's preferential treatment, Hong Kong's Commerce and Economic Development Bureau, confirmed to The South China Morning Post, the Australian actress and other film crew had been granted an exemption "to carry out designated professional work."
The news comes as from Friday, vaccinated people arriving from Australia will have to quarantine in a hotel for 14 days as the country is reclassified from a low-risk to medium-risk country.
The Hong Kong Free Press reported Kidman has been seen out and about shopping and has been subject to criticism on social media.
One Twitter user wrote, "Dear #HongKong friends and family, While you are locked into a hotel room for three weeks, how does it feel to know that if you are from Hollywood, you are exempt from the barbaric quarantine rules HK residents are subjected to?"
"What the world needs at this juncture is a Prime Video series about the privileged lives of American expats in Hong Kong, with Nicole Kidman," tweeted another.
"Expats", starring and executive produced by Kidman, is based on Janice Y.K. Lee's book "The Expatriates" about a group of close-knit wealthy women expatriates in Hong Kong.
Australian writer Alice Bell ("The Beautiful Lie", "The Slap") penned the script for the series which is directed by "The Farewell" 's Lulu Wang and co-stars Jack Huston.
It's not the first quarantine controversy that Kidman has been embroiled in. Last June she hit headlines when she and her husband Keith Urban were exempted by the Australian state of New South Wales' hotel quarantine in favour of home quarantine after they flew into Sydney from the U.S. ahead of production of the mini-series "Nine Perfect Strangers".
