Nicole Kidman wondered if she was the right person to play Lucille Ball after facing criticism

Nicole Kidman is one of the most renowned actresses in the world but she faced backlash after being cast as Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos. The late I Love Lucy star holds a special place in many people‘s hearts and with the internet, people didn’t hold back sharing their concerns that she did not look enough like Ball.

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Kidman stars opposite Javier Bardem (Desi Arnaz) in the Amazon Studios film and she told TODAY she tried not to let the criticism get to her. “But (I’m) a human being, so there’s times when you go, ‘Gosh, maybe I’m not the right person for this,’” the academy award winner said.

Thankfully Kidman had support in all the right places. Aaron Sorkin, the writer and director of the project reassured her the goal was not for a “perfect rendition or imitation.” “That’s where having somebody like Aaron, who really said at the beginning, he was like, ‘I’m not wanting a perfect rendition or imitation of Lucy. No, no, no, no, no,” she told the outlet.

Plus, she had the support of Ball and Desi Arnaz’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz. When she found out about the public outcry she took to Facebook to defend Kidman. “You should understand, we are not doing a remake of ‘I Love Lucy.’ No one has to impersonate Lucy Ricardo,” she said in a video. “It’s the story of Lucille Ball, my actual mother, not Lucy Ricardo, and her husband, Desi Arnaz, my dad, not Ricky Ricardo. There will be humor in the film, but it is a story of the two of them and how they met and what went right with finding the show, what went wrong, their relationship, their love affair.”

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Ball and Dezi divorce in 1960. The actress died in 1989 and the age of 77 of a ruptured aorta after open-heart surgery and Arnaz died in 1986 at the age of 69 due to lung cancer. They were survived by their two children, Lucie and Desi Jr.