Advertisement
Home LIFE & CULTURE Entertainment

Nicole Kidman Wants ‘Babygirl’ Sex Scenes To Make You Hot, Giggly And Uncomfortable 

“That’s the game of it; it’s meant to be a wild ride"
Nicole Kidman on babygirl sex scenes
Image: Vicki King

In June 2024, the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award – the highest honour in American cinema, bestowed upon an actor “whose talent has in a fundamental way advanced the film art and whose work has stood the test of time” – went to a rookie.

Advertisement

Actually, that’s not entirely true. It went to Nicole Kidman, an actor who, in her more than 40-year career has won an Oscar, a BAFTA, two Emmys and five Golden Globes; has accrued more than 100 acting credits; runs her own production company; was appointed Companion of the Order of Australia for her service to the performing arts; and still – above all and despite it all – feels like the new girl. “I still feel like I’m starting out, which is the weirdest thing,” she says, laughing. “I felt like, ‘Hold on a second – that was all just an experiment!’” Like a fever dream? “Yes, exactly.”

Kidman is speaking to marie claire from her home in Nashville, where she lives with her husband, country music star Keith Urban, their daughters, 16-year-old Sunday and 14-year-old Faith; and her poodle, Julian, who’s decided at the last minute to join us for our interview. Kidman has just returned home after a whirlwind schedule working on the new series Scarpetta with Jamie Lee Curtis, in which she plays a medical examiner (“I can do autopsies now”), and the Los Angeles premiere of her new film, Babygirl. It’s getting cold over there, and she’s looking forward to returning to her first home, Australia, “for some R and R”.

The rest and relaxation are well-earned. In the past calendar year alone, Kidman has appeared in the six-part drama series Expats, returned to the thriller series Special Ops: Lioness, starred in the murder-mystery series The Perfect Couple, as well as the rom-com film A Family Affair, and then rounded it out with the A24 psycho-sexual drama Babygirl, one of the bravest big-screen performances of her career. That she’s traversed mainstream hits and low-budget indie productions in a matter of months is not surprising for someone of her work ethic, but it is impressive.

Nicole Kidman on babygirl sex scenes
Image: Vicki King
Advertisement

Babygirl, which hits cinemas on January 30, in particular, was emotionally exhausting and physically demanding. Dubbed “the hottest movie of the year” by multiple outlets, Babygirl is an erotic thriller written and directed by the Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn and it is, well, thrilling. Kidman plays Romy, a middle-aged woman with a mysterious past, who is the CEO of an Amazon-esque warehouse robotics company.

As these things go, she seems to have it all: a hot theatre-director husband (played by Antonio Banderas) and two fun, cool teen/tween daughters (played by Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly). She has a doting and efficient assistant (up-and-coming Australian talent Sophie Wilde), a corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows and an endless wardrobe of silk blouses. Romy has mastered the She-EO MO: she’s approachable and firm while being authoritative and soft; she’s careful to remain in charge while not being “bossy” or “a bitch”. It’s clear from the outset that she’s shutting down something inside of her and has been successful at pushing it under the figurative rug – until now. What’s making her come undone? The new young intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who has decided he must – and will – have her.

What follows is a game of cat-and-mouse, a push and pull, a power dynamic that shifts throughout the film but also within a matter of seconds. Without words, Romy and Samuel trade places, grasping for dominance where they can and secretly indulging in submission where they can’t. There’s a dirty hotel room, a command to lap at a saucer of milk, crawl on all fours, come here, take that off, do what I say, you like that don’t you (not a question).

Age, gender, power, control – it’s all elastic. Romy doesn’t fall into it easily, she appears to be in a constant state of shock and repulsion – with herself, with Samuel – for surrendering to her deepest, darkest desires. “There are a lot of times when she’s saying to him, ‘You’re behaviour is wild and inappropriate,’ and she’s outraged at him but she’s actually saying it to herself,” explains Kidman. “She fluctuates between being angry at herself for doing these things but then suddenly she’s back in it. She’s so surprised with herself.” By surrendering to her repressed sexuality, Romy is liberated. Kidman calls it an “emotional and sexual odyssey”.

nicole kidman and harris dickinson filming babygirl sex scenes
Image: A24
Advertisement

Nicole On Being Called A ‘Good Girl’ And “Confronting” Sex Scenes

The question of who’s in control is asked over and over again with no clear answer. At one point, Samuel stands over Romy and in a low voice says, “Good girl”. The audience – in a cinema that had been so quiet you could hear a pin drop – collectively gasped. The internet had a similar reaction when Timothée Chalamet said the same thing to Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird back in 2017 while sitting on the hood of a car. The latter “good girl” prompted YouTube edits called things like “Timothée Chalamet saying ‘good girl’ for 1 minute straight” (one million views); the former prompted the think-piece “Why Is Being Called ‘A Good Girl’ The Hottest Thing Ever?” on betches.com.

To be told in real life by a real man that you’re a good girl rankles: it’s patronising and, depending who says it, creepy rather than sexy. Like a verbal pat on the head. So why does it turn on an entire audience when Timmy and Harris say it (aside from the obvious: that the actors are attractive)? Is there something to the idea that your real-life values and ideologies don’t always translate to the bedroom; that it’s OK when feminism clashes with desire, even though (or especially because) it feels forbidden?

Hearing that review – the communal yet unspoken “that was hot” – makes Kidman laugh. “It’s meant to be funny and hot,” she says. “That’s the game of it; it’s meant to be a wild ride that builds in its intensity. I just love how Halina has been able to capture that. There were [some scenes like that] that I read on paper and I thought, ‘What does this really mean?’ and then as we were shooting, I was like, ‘Oh, this is the essence of the whole film.’” Reijn keeps her scripts sparse to allow for collaboration and spontaneity on set, says Kidman. “Everything is written, but you have to go and find it and flesh it out. There was one line that was like, ‘She picks up the tie from the floor and puts it in her mouth,’ so then it’s like, ‘OK, well, how do you do that?’ There are so many different ways you can do that.” (The way she does it is a brilliant display of shocking, unsettling, understandable, all-consuming arousal.)

“[Harris and I] had to surrender to the material, understand the material and then also throw that out and allow our visceral nature as actors to exist,” she explains. “It was so raw that, particularly for me, it was really confronting as a woman and as an actress doing it, so it was like, ‘OK this is going to be uncomfortable and confronting at times, and there’s a danger that has to come through.’ It’s [questioning] what is consent and what is power and what do you actually desire? That hasn’t really been explored on screen for women through a female gaze.”

Advertisement

To prepare for the film, Kidman and Reijn met frequently in New York and let all of their guards down. Often sitting on the floor, they would go over each provocative scene and revise it together, sharing their personal experiences with each other, like girlfriends catching up after one of them has been on a date. Kidman credits Reijn’s maternal instinct as the reason she was able to be so emotionally and physically vulnerable on screen. “She would hold me and go, ‘Are you OK?’ She would always check in. I wouldn’t have done this if I’d felt that it was a dangerous place for me to go, because it was very vulnerable and raw, emotionally as well as physically, but if that person is there going, ‘I’ve got you, I’m never going to betray you,’ then it’s incredibly safe.”

Illicit desire is not the only form examined in Babygirl, it also examines the marital. The film opens with Romy and her husband, Jacob, having sex. Romy appears satisfied, until she sneaks off down the dark hallway to watch porn and masturbate. Her husband doesn’t know what she wants, but Samuel intuits it exactly. In an attempt to bring her true sexuality into her marriage bed, Romy tries to play out a fantasy with her husband, only for him to giggle in embarrassment. “She tries to bring him in, tries to play a game, and he doesn’t understand. He tells her he doesn’t want to be a villain,” explains Kidman. “And that’s OK, but Romy has made herself into something [to satisfy] him and then at a certain point she went, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’ You can see her thinking, ‘Can I go through my whole life not actually accessing what I desire?’ I think that’s relatable to any gender at different times, so the desire aspect is just about being human.”

Nicole Kidman on babygirl sex scenes
Image: Vicki King

On The Rise Of Age-Gap Romances For Women

Babygirl captures the zeitgeist moment we’re in, when books and films are exploring what it means for a woman to follow her desires – often with a younger man who is forbidden for reasons other than age. The film Last Summer kicked things off in 2023. In it, Anne, a happily married mother and a successful lawyer, has an affair with her step-son. In The Idea of You, out in early 2024, Anne Hathaway’s Solène, a mother and gallerist, starts a relationship with her daughter’s pop-star crush. In Miranda July’s 2024 novel, All Fours, the happily married perimenopausal protagonist is a mother and a famous artist who has an “almost affair” with a younger fan of her work. Then there was last year’s Lonely Planet, in which a novelist (Laura Dern) starts a relationship with a younger man (Liam Hemsworth) on a retreat. Still to come: Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, in which the widowed Bridget (Renée Zellweger) has 20 years on her new boyfriend, played by Leo Woodall; I Want Your Sex, an erotic thriller starring Olivia Wilde (40) and Cooper Hoffman (21); and Marty Supreme, for which the aforementioned 29-year-old Chalamet was spotted filming a kissing scene with his 52-year-old co-star, Gwyneth Paltrow.

Advertisement

Kidman contributed another piece to the cougar cultural cannon with Netflix’s A Family Affair, which came out the week before Babygirl premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August. In it she plays Brooke, a widowed mother and famous author, who falls in love with her daughter’s movie-star boss (Zac Efron), who is 16 years her junior. Where A Family Affair differs from Babygirl is in the rom-com of it all. Babygirl is not romantic – it has moments of sweetness, sure, but love-struck Romy is not. Where Brooke is giddy, Romy longs to be dominated. As Reijn has said, Babygirl is about how “a lot of women are not at ease with the beast in themselves. They’d rather outsource it to a bad boyfriend.”

Reijn is not encouraging women to have affairs, rather, she wants to remove the shame that’s so often connected to women’s desires, and encourage conversations. “It’s what Halina calls radical honesty,” says Kidman. One of the most brilliant things about Babygirl is the lack of moralising and judgement that Halina has for Romy. “Romy judges herself,” explains Kidman, because of the notions of neat-and-tidy female sexuality she’s internalised, but Reijn doesn’t judge her, and so, the audience doesn’t. “Romy is so tough on herself, and Halina is saying, ‘Go easy.’ She is trying to liberate women – or people in general – from this need to be performative.”

One of the ways Reijn’s done that is to remove the blockbuster-sheen from the sex scenes. “In cinema, those things are done so perfectly, like suddenly the woman’s a professional lap dancer and you’re like, ‘Gosh, I don’t think I could ever do that,’” Kidman says, laughing. In Babygirl, those scenes are awkward, they’re funny, they’re cringey. “[Halina] breaks the fourth wall and has us laugh at different times.” In the cheap hotel room, Samuel tells Romy to get on her knees and she clearly doesn’t want to touch the dirty carpet. In that moment, neither of them knows what to do next. “Or when he tells her to take her dress off and she says, ‘It feels awkward,’” Kidman says, laughing again. “It’s so human, it’s not perfect.”

Nicole Kidman on babygirl sex scenes
Image: Vicki King

On Playing Imperfect Women

Much has been said lately of the similarities between Kidman’s recent roles. On the surface, sure: they’ve been wealthy matriarchs and professional overachievers with a penchant for quietly luxurious fabrics, and – on the surface – Romy does fit into this mould. But a closer read of each character reveals differences: some are grieving, some are harbouring dark secrets, some are living for others, and others are living for themselves. It’s true that earlier in her career, Kidman’s roles were more aesthetically distinct (she was unrecognisable in the 2002 Virginia Woolf biopic The Hours). But she is now in an era of exploring the lives of the kinds of women we aspire to be, shattering the notion that a perfectly manicured facade indicates a perfect life. And so, while Babygirl is visually on-brand for Kidman, she says the film “is definitely new territory for me. I haven’t dealt in this milieu before, in this landscape of sexuality.”

Advertisement

Kidman was drawn to the film via Reijn’s lesser-known 2019 debut feature, Instinct, about a prison therapist infatuated with the rapist she’s treating. “I was just intrigued by her, so I reached out,” says Kidman. After a two-hour phone call, they kept texting. Reijn sent Kidman an early draft of Babygirl. “I just thought this combination of her having written it and the material, it was so bold and so interesting and new,” she says. (There was also the name: “baby girl” is Urban’s nickname for his wife, and he even has it tattooed on the back of his neck.) “[The film] could have worked, it could have not worked,” says Kidman. Considering that she was nominated for the best actress Golden Globe and won the Venice Film Festival’s Volpi Cup for best actress at the premiere, it seems to have worked.

Kidman is well aware, in the most humble of ways, that having her name attached to a project can get it the green light. She and her friend, film producer Per Saari, started their production company, Blossom Films, in 2010 with the distinct purpose to support, foster and promote female creatives and stories. On their showreel: Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers (both adaptations of novels by Australian author Liane Moriarty), The Undoing (the one with Hugh Grant and all the great coats), Love & Death (starring Elizabeth Olsen), Lioness and The Perfect Couple, among others. “Being a producer means I get to help shepherd projects that maybe wouldn’t find their way, and that’s exciting to me,” says Kidman. “I’m willing to show up in smaller roles to have other people shine, or to have directors and writers find their place and find their voice and have the opportunity and the support. I love it, I love doing it. It’s my way of staying grateful and present and connected to the people who are coming behind me. I’ve been the recipient of that myself at different times, and it still surprises me that I can be that person for someone else.”

One of the mentors she is referring to is the New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion. Way back when, Campion tried to cast Kidman in one of her student films, but Kidman turned it down because she’d have to wear a shower cap. (She says that was the last time she said no to a role out of vanity.) In 1996, Kidman starred in Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady. “Jane always said, ‘Protect your talent.’ If that gets used and abused or hurt in any way, that’s very, very dangerous,” recalls Kidman. “Go where the love is, is the simplest way to put it. That doesn’t mean there won’t be discomfort or challenge or struggle, it just means that you’ll be with people who protect your talent. I never understood that until now, and I always pass that onto younger people.”

Sophie Wilde, who plays Romy’s assistant Esme, benefited from Kidman’s advice. Working with her was “unreal”, says Wilde. “She’s just a powerhouse of her craft and that’s incredible to lay witness to. It felt like a bit of a masterclass – watching someone of that calibre is innately going to teach you so much – and seeing Nicole’s utter fearlessness and her desire to interrogate every scene was so captivating to watch and play against. I learnt a lot about presence and exploration and the continuous search for the humanity in our work.”

Advertisement

On Grief

Just before Babygirl premiered at Venice, Kidman’s life fell apart. She touched down in Italy to news that her mother, Janelle, had passed away suddenly at 84, and she immediately flew home to be with her family. “I’m so lucky to have this beautiful sister, who is my other half, who I can walk through this with,” she says, referring to Antonia, and adds that the whole family is “in it together”.

That includes her six “amazing nieces and nephews” and daughters, who have both appeared in the spotlight recently – Sunday made her runway debut for Miu Miu at Paris Fashion Week in October, and Faith stuck by her mother’s side at the Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment Gala in December. Still, Kidman says, grief is lonely. “It’s a whole different place and space – there are no instructions, which is what I’m finding out. But I’m very lucky that I’m this age losing my mum, because I know many people lose their parents young.”

So now it’s about figuring out “how to move onto the next thing” and carry her memory forward. Kidman is finding subtle ways to do that. The custom Balenciaga couture gown she wore to the Los Angeles premiere of Babygirl in December was an ode to her mother and her grandmother, who both loved fashion. Inspired by a floral appliqué coat from the spring/summer 1964 collection, creative director Demna created a column gown featuring handpainted and hand-cut petals that took 24 artisans 2850 hours to make. “My mother and grandmother were beautiful seamstresses. My grandmother made all of my Barbie outfits, so I had ‘Couture Barbie,’” she remembers, laughing. “My mother made all of my clothes as a little girl. They could embroider and do all these things I can’t do, so this was my homage to them in a way, carrying forward the love of it and of them.”

Babygirl is in cinemas January 30.

This story appeared in the February issue of marie claire Australia.

Advertisement

Related stories


Advertisement