Nicole Kidman receives backlash after evading Hong Kong's quarantine to shoot 'Expats'

Hollywood star Nicole Kidman has stirred controversy after skipping Hong Kong's strict COVID-19 quarantine norms to film for her upcoming Amazon series 'Expats' in the city. She has received backlash after taking a private jet from Sydney to Hong Kong on August 12 and being exempted from the city's seven-day quarantine rule for vaccinated people coming in from Australia, even as Sydney faces a lockdown following a spike in Delta variant cases, Hollywood Reporter stated. According to local reports, Hong Kong's Commerce and Economic Development Bureau had to explain the biased treatment to Kidman, under mounting public pressure, to which they confirmed that the actors and other crew members ad been given an exemption "to carry out designated professional work.". 

From Friday, the vaccinated people pouting in from Australia will be required to undergo quarantine in a hotel for 14 days as the country has been reclassified from a low-risk to medium-risk one. 

Nicole Kidman faces backlash after skipping COVID quarantine 

The Oscar-winning star's stint after dodging the stringent quarantine rules has drawn flack from the press and on social media. Local reports also mentioned that Kidman was seen roaming the streets of Hong Kong as she shopped last week, becoming a point of discussion in the tabloids. 

Compulsory quarantine of people arriving at Hong Kong from foreign places was viewed as uniformly applied till now, until Nicole's incident. In recent weeks, even the chairman of one of the world's largest banks, HSBC, Mark Tucker, was required to undergo 3-week isolation following his arrival from the U.K. 

A spokesman for Hong Kong's CEDB  stated that the exemption had been mainly provided on the grounds of performing designated professional work, "which is conducive to maintain the necessary operation and development of Hong Kong's economy". The statement also mandates such an exemption to be complied with "designated disease prevention measures and other conditions to minimise any transmission risk and contact with the public, including but not limited to vaccinations prior to arrival, a designated place of stay, testing and securing negative COVID-19 results on arrival and at intervals in line with the prevailing requirement of the Department of Health". 

They also added that necessary checks, verification, and monitoring to ensure compliance have been carried out, and no breach of the exemption conditions by the concerned people has been identified so far. 

More about Kidman's upcoming series

Expats, starring and executively produced by Kidman is a series based on Janice Y.K. Lee's book The Expatriates' centres on a group of wealthy women expatriates in Hong Kong. The series, which is being helmed by Lulu Wang and co-stars, Jack Huston has got its script from Australian scribe Alice Bell. 

As per Hollywood Reporter, the series would mark streamer Amazon's first-look film and TV deal with Kidman, which was announced in June 2018 as one of Amazon Chief Jennifer Salke's first such deals. 

(Image- AP)