Perhaps the biggest revelation to come out of the Practical Magic 2 promotional campaign so far has absolutely nothing to do with the movie. Nicole Kidman has just informed us that when someone annoys her, she writes their name on a piece of paper and puts it in the freezer. Naturally, after nearly four decades in Hollywood, one question becomes impossible to avoid: who exactly has already spent some time in Nicole Kidman’s freezer?

Even better, this does not seem to be a joke invented to promote the return of Gillian Owens. In an interview with British outlet SheerLuxe, conducted by Kidman’s niece Lucia Hawley, the actress revealed that the women in the Kidman family have always had a certain affinity for the mystical. Janelle Kidman, Nicole’s mother and Lucia’s grandmother, was born on Friday the 13th and, according to her granddaughter, used to keep a list of names near the ice tray.

In other words, perhaps Practical Magic required less character research than we thought.

During the conversation, Lucia asked Nicole and Sandra Bullock about their favorite spells. Nicole first chose love spells, but then added that when she gets a little upset with someone, she prefers another technique: name on paper, paper in freezer.

“Freezes them out,” she explained, turning the familiar expression into something wonderfully literal. Sandra, naturally, wanted to know whether she had ever ended up in there during filming. Nicole assured her she had not. Good to know. Or at least that is what Sandra believes.

Nicole also explained that you can come out of the freezer. There is just one curious rule: the person being defrosted is not informed. “They will feel it,” Lucia said. And just like that, Nicole Kidman’s kitchen appliance became far more intriguing than any Oscar party guest list.

It is tempting, of course, to start suggesting names. Ex-husbands, rivals, studio executives, directors, particularly unkind critics… There would certainly be no shortage of possibilities. But the fun is precisely in not knowing. Everyone can mentally assemble their own shelf of likely candidates.

The ritual, however, did not begin with the Kidman family. And this is where the story becomes even more interesting. The idea of symbolically doing something to produce the same effect in real life appears across many cultures and goes back centuries. In the late 19th century, anthropologist James George Frazer grouped practices of this kind under the concept of “sympathetic magic”: through what he called the law of similarity, a symbolic action represents the desired result. Cooling, binding, or freezing something therefore comes to mean cooling down or stopping whatever it represents.

The more specific ritual of placing someone’s name in ice or in a freezer is strongly associated with African American hoodoo and conjure traditions, where cold-working practices have been used to silence someone, stop their actions, or simply keep them at a distance. The point is not necessarily to curse anyone, but rather to freeze their interference.

The practice later spread and developed variations across different cultures and families. At its core, the logic remains simple: physically represent what you want to produce symbolically.

So it would be a stretch to say that the freezer spell itself is universal. What is nearly universal is the principle behind it. In Brazil, where simpatias have long been part of everyday folklore, the mechanism feels instantly familiar. The difference is that now we know Nicole Kidman does it too.

And just weeks before Practical Magic 2 arrives in theaters on September 10, that may be the best marketing campaign imaginable: Gillian Owens does not disappear when Nicole Kidman leaves the set. Apparently, she just heads to the kitchen.