Nicole Kidman only realised 'Little Big Lies' was a success when she started getting texts from her husband's friends.

Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman

The 49-year-old actress stars as Celeste Wright on the hit HBO comedy drama series, and has said that whilst the show has received critical acclaim, she didn't realise just how successful it had become until friends of her husband Keith Urban began to tell her they "couldn't wait" to watch the next episode.

She said: "It was weird, when it first came out I remember calling and being like, 'Awww, I was hoping it would be a little more successful.' I was like, maybe it's not going to hit the place we really wanted it to hit, and then it just started to snowball. And the great thing was, because it was on HBO, everyone had to wait each week to see the next step.

"Then I was suddenly being recognised in airports and on airplanes, and women were coming up to me on the street and talking about the character and what was going to happen next, and I was getting texts from Keith's friends. And they were saying, 'We're staying in Sunday night, we're ordering pizza, we're putting the kids to bed, we can't wait to watch!' And then I thought, 'Wow, this is working.'"

Nicole - who has who has children Isabella, 24, and Connor, 22, with ex-husband Tom Cruise, and daughters Sunday, eight, and Faith, six, with her current spouse - also spoke about her scenes with her on-screen husband Alexander Skarsgard, and said she often wouldn't tell him when their violent scenes caused her physical pain as she wanted it to be "incredibly real".

Speaking on 'The Ellen Degeneres Show', Nicole said: "I felt a sense of duty that I wanted to give truth to such a complicated story, and I wanted it to be incredibly real for the audience, so I threw myself into it, to the point where I would come home at night with bruises and really sore. And he would grab me, and Alexander did not mean to do this - and I would never tell him that he was hurting me - because I wanted him to commit to the scenes. Then when people watch them as an audience, they can feel that somehow this is real, and that was important to me because the storyline is about domestic abuse, and that's a very, very important, serious, relevant subject right now."

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