Feature Friday: Troye Sivan Had Nicole Kidman's Number Saved Since 2018, and This Year He Finally Used It

Here is a strange, small fact about pop music in October 2026: a real 59-year-old Academy Award-winning actress has become, independently, the reference point for two completely unrelated songs by two completely unrelated artists in the same release cycle. Slovak singer ADÉLA named a song “Nicole Kidman” – currently sitting at No. 9 on the Hot 100 – as a way of describing her own sense of glamour and control, telling interviewers she had “the swoop and corset on” and felt like Kidman before she’d written a word. And this August, Troye Sivan cast the actual Nicole Kidman in the music video for “She’s the Best,” the title track of his comeback album, built entirely around the idea of her as a muse. Neither artist is working from the other’s playbook. Both landed on the same real person as shorthand for the same thing: a specific, inimitable kind of star power that neither 2026 pop stardom nor its own best efforts can quite manufacture from scratch.

Sivan’s version of that idea has a history behind it that ADÉLA’s doesn’t. He and Kidman co-starred in 2018’s Boy Erased, a film about a young man sent to gay conversion therapy, with Kidman playing his mother – a serious, emotionally difficult project, not the kind of relationship that typically produces a club-video cameo eight years later. When Sivan and his creative team were brainstorming concepts for “She’s the Best,” he’s said Kidman was his immediate first choice, and that he still had her phone number saved from filming. That detail is doing more work than it looks like it’s doing: the video isn’t stunt-casting a famous name for a cheap headline, it’s calling in an actual, specific relationship, which is the difference between a gimmick and a genuine idea.

What director Gordon von Steiner built from that idea leans into 1980s queer New York club imagery – drag queens, trans performers, RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Sasha Colby, a camera that treats the club as a found community rather than a backdrop. Sivan performs while Kidman watches from the crowd, the two dance together briefly, and by the video’s end Sivan himself appears in drag, with the two of them sashaying through the club’s backrooms together. Kidman isn’t playing herself exactly, and she isn’t playing a character either – she’s playing the specific idea Sivan has described the song as being about: a tribute to “incredible women,” filtered through someone whose own screen career has spent decades being read, by other people, as exactly that kind of icon.

That’s the thing a two-paragraph capsule review can’t hold, and it’s the actual reason “She’s the Best” works as the first single from Sivan’s fourth album rather than just another comeback single among dozens releasing the same month. The song itself – warm, confident, more interested in digging into complicated feelings than in the party atmosphere its chorus promises – is good front-to-back, part of an album critics have already flagged for giving Sivan more room to sit in darker, more unresolved emotional territory than his earlier work allowed. But the video is what turns a good single into an event, and the video only works because of eight years of real history nobody manufactured for the cameras. ADÉLA’s “Nicole Kidman” borrows the actress as a metaphor from a respectful distance. Sivan’s “She’s the Best” didn’t have to borrow anything – he just had to make the call.

Hero image: Troye Sivan performing at Capital Pride, Washington, D.C., 2018, photo by Ted Eytan. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.