“Being the Ricardos” stars Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball. This isn’t the first time the Oscar winner had played the leading lady of a sitcom.
2005’s “Bewitched” saw Kidman as Isabel Bigelow, a real witch who’s cast to play Samantha Stephens on a remake series of the ‘60s classic. Her co-star is popular Hollywood actor Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell).
“Bewitched” was the first PG-13 rated movie I ever saw in a theater (in Cape Cod, to be precise). It opened in June 2005, right around when I began looking at the weekend box office results on a, well, weekly basis.
Director Nora Ephron’s Sony comedy debuted to $20 million and grossed $63 million total in North America. It opened only a month after another Ferrell comedy, the PG-rated “Kicking and Screaming”.
“Bewitched” also starred Michael Caine, Shirley MacLaine, Jason Schwartzman, Kristin Chenoweth, David Alan Grier and… Steve Carell as Uncle Arthur, just two months before he would break through in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”.
Another co-star: Stephen Colbert. He had fun reminiscing with Kidman during an episode of “The Late Show” in 2017. “You were the first true movie star that I ever saw work on camera. The first scene I got to see you shoot with Will [Ferrell]… I remember when you turned to him in the scene and he’s supposed to fall in love with you, you turned on some light in your body. And everyone on set fell in love with you at that moment. It was extraordinary. I’m not joking. As soon as the scene was over, Will came over to me and said, ‘Did you just see what happened?’ True star power.”
When I saw the “Bewitched” movie for the first time, I was already familiar with the old series — and with the world of behind the scenes TV — but it was so fun to see it all portrayed on the big screen. Genuinely funny, romantic and one of my favorite films about show business. And 16+ years later, it’s still one of the handful of movies that, if I see it’s playing on TV, I will stop what I’m doing and watch part of it. It casts that great of a spell.