"Behind Nicole Kidman’s Erotic Drama ‘Babygirl’: ‘What Have I Just Done?’ | Vanity Fair"
Nicole Kidman has still not seen Babygirl, and she’s not sure whether the Venice International Film Festival premiere next week will be the place to do it. “There’s something in me going, Okay, this was made for the big screen and to be seen with people,” she tells me. “But then I’m like, That’s a high-wire act. I’m not sure I have that much bravery.” She sounds as if she’s working out her plans while we chat, in her first interview about the movie. Having just seen it, I get it. “Maybe I will see it that way—I’ll let you know,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve made some films that are pretty exposing, but not like this.”
Without question, the film directed by Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) showcases the actor at her movie-star best, with the chance to give a deeper, bolder performance in a feature than she’s had in some time. It also fits within her decorated résumé, and her well-known willingness to take on projects with frank portrayals of female sexuality. Yet Babygirl still enters surprising territory. In Reijn’s hands, it’s a masterclass in kink, blasting through a collective shame around sexual fantasies by presenting one woman’s journey without judgment and in rich, complex layers. It ranges from silly to scary to messy to profoundly sad. Well, and sexy. Always sexy.
“I know we accomplished one thing, and that is that we made a really hot movie,” Reijn says with a wide smile. “I don't know about good, bad—that’s up to everybody—but I’m sure of that.”
An accomplished Dutch stage actor turned director, Reijn wrote Babygirl out of her enduring love for the erotic drama. She came into her own as an artist on the work of directors like Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct) and Adrian Lyne (Indecent Proposal). “They made me feel less alone with my own hidden sexual fantasies and desires, and from that moment on, I started to dream about being able to create something like that myself—but from my own perspective,” she says. “This gave me more fire to try to shine a light on that, because I’m still struggling with my own shame around it.”
Babygirl stars Kidman as Romy, a powerful New York business executive who’s seemingly balancing professional success and personal fulfillment in her marriage to a theater director (played by Antonio Banderas). The crack in that façade reveals itself late at night, when Romy masturbates alone, after having sex with her husband. She’s disconnected from her desires. The specific focus on the female orgasm is central to Reijn’s intent. “In movies, you still so often see a woman have an orgasm oncreen that is anatomically not possible,” she says. That reality hints at Romy’s internal torment: “The more perfect you want to be, the more dangerously things start to crumble down—and you have to deal with the things that are actually inside you.”
Enter Samuel (Triangle of Sadness’s Harris Dickinson), the company’s new intern—and the instigator for this movie to get steamy-fun. When he manages to get Romy assigned as his official mentor, he makes his attraction to her clear. From there, the bounds of a forbidden sexual dynamic are ironed out, beat by beat, and fueled by differences in power, age, and gender. Reijn invests in the actual negotiation between two people exploring desires that edge toward peril and submission. The director calls this aspect of Babygirl an “X-ray” of kink. It’s compelling, oddly revelatory—and crucial to the film’s irresistible erotic power. “They try to play these different, fun roles with each other, but they can also be scary and embarrassing,” Reijn says. “We don’t show this glossy fantasy; it’s actually an attempt to show the human side of all of that. In my eyes, it’s way more hot because it’s not just a perfect end result—which is often how it goes in the bedroom.”
Romy and Samuel’s first true encounter, a brilliantly staged duet in a shabby hotel room, crystallizes all this and redefines Romy for the audience. “When we meet her, we just see the upper layer of her existence that looks very attractive and Christmassy and Sound of Music–like,” Reijn says. “In a hidden hotel room, we see a very different animal, if you will. I think a lot of women are not at ease with the beast in themselves. They’d rather outsource it to a bad boyfriend.”
Halina Reijn with Nicole Kidman.
Reijn wrote Babygirl with Kidman in mind. As an actor herself, when she was waiting in the wings and about to go onstage, she’d think of Kidman’s screen work to steel herself to get on with the show. “I was so scared that I wanted to vomit and I wanted to die, so I would channel Nicole—I never knew her personally, of course, but her fearlessness in her movies was a torch that I was humbly trying to carry,” Reijn says. She knew Romy would need an actor of that fearlessness—and she got one. “I just kind of went, ‘Right, that’s it. I will open myself up to you every which way, and let’s see where we go together,’” Kidman says. “I would hope that you feel us in the movie, because it’s very much an us.”
In their extensive preparation, Kidman and Reijn met often in New York. They’d talk about their rawest life experiences, and examine the script’s most provocative scenes and revise them together. “A lot of the themes in my movies have been explored through the lens of sexuality,” Kidman says. “I’ve not eliminated that or tried to pretend it isn’t there.” Still, telling a movie so explicitly from a female point of view, with a woman behind the camera, felt unique. The collaboration offered Kidman a level of intimacy into that kind of filmmaking she’d never experienced before.
“It was being able to talk unbelievably honestly and graphically—and that’s woman-to-woman, as though you are sitting on your bed and talking to your sister or your best friend,” Kidman says. “That’s incredibly safe. Halina has a very strong maternal instinct, so she was very protective of all of us. But particularly me.”
When it came to choreographing the sex scenes, which Reijn captures in radically long takes, safety was emphasized. Kidman and Dickinson worked with intimacy coordinators who could precisely structure a given sequence’s many twists and turns, signaling moments of pleasure, discomfort, and everything in between for the actors to play authentically. These were blocked out in rehearsals and then adjusted during actual production as necessary. When it came down to it, the actors were dialed in, with Reijn’s camera just rolling and rolling. “I never came out of it, really,” Kidman says.
When Kidman digs in, there’s nothing quite like it. “It left me ragged. At some point I was like, I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to do this anymore, but at the same time I was compelled to do it. Halina would hold me and I would hold her, because it was just very confronting to me,” Kidman says. She admits this remains the case, months after filming: “It’s like, Golly, I’m doing this, and it’s actually now going to be seen by the world. That’s a very weird feeling. This is something you do and hide in your home videos. It is not a thing that normally is going to be seen by the world.”
“I felt very exposed as an actor, as a woman, as a human being,” she continues. “I had to go in and go out like, I need to put my protection back on. What have I just done? Where did I go? What did I do?”
Antonio Banderas with Kidman.
The seductive dynamic between Romy and Samuel plays out as distinctly modern. Credit surely goes to Reijn, who’s coming off of the bloody Gen-Z satire Bodies Bodies Bodies with another savvy understanding of contemporary mores. And Dickinson is a wholly unexpected foil in this two-hander: He can issue an imposing command and a puppy-dog apology in the same breath, and somehow keep it sexy.
“How Harris plays the dom is so different from how someone of Gen X would have played the dom in my time,” Reijn says. “I wanted to create a male character that was experimenting and also confused by, Who am I supposed to be as a man right now? What is masculinity and how do I ask for consent, if at the same time, I’m being asked to be a dominator?”
Babygirl will land in the thick of ongoing debates among younger viewers as to the necessity—and quantity—of explicit sex in movies. Reijn was keenly aware of that conversation, and feels the effects of digital saturation herself. “It’s very important in a society that is polarizing all over the place, in every way, that we keep shining light on the things that we’re afraid of,” she says, before joking that friends sometimes refer to her as a “prude.” It’s hard to believe after watching Babygirl, but perhaps that’s exactly the point. The film is undeniably titillating (Reijn prefers “juicy”)—and rather than operating in the dark, fatalistic mode of many an erotic drama, it’s a rollicking, risqué entertainment that winds its way toward hope. It’s strangely, even sweetly moving.
When I mention to Kidman the current controversy around sex in movies, she’s stumped. “What did you say?” she asks. I explain the topic more thoroughly. “I’m not familiar with many things,” she says. “I just work with abandonment.” This much is evident in Babygirl. She tells me that she hadn’t gotten to work in this “A24, indie filmmaking” style in a long time and found it inspiring. “You’re grabbing things when you can, you’re doing what you can—you’re in a very limited timeframe, but everyone’s there sharing heart and soul,” she says.
What did Kidman share—and gain—in the making of Babygirl? “It’s personal,” she says quickly. She feels like she still doesn’t have her “armor” on right now, as the premiere waits around the corner. A wide array of reactions, she knows, lie ahead. “That’s vulnerable, but I’m never going to shy away from that to my dying day,” Kidman says. “I’ll place myself in a vulnerable position, and see where that takes me.”
Babygirl will premiere this Friday at the Venice Film Festival before being released in U.S. theaters by A24 on December 25. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.
