Australian actor and her co-star Harris Dickinson discuss their new film about a risky workplace affair
Such are the topsy-turvy pleasures of Babygirl, a gut-twistingly timely, funny and, yes, sexy new spin on the erotic thriller, which opened in Irish cinemas yesterday. In it, Kidman (57) plays Romy, the married but sexually frustrated CEO of an AI-driven logistics firm, while the 28-year-old Dickinson is Samuel, the louring intern whose total lack of servility ignites her own submissive streak.
Meanwhile, fretting at home is Romy’s preposterously handsome and considerate theatre-director husband, played by Antonio Banderas: a genius piece of “why go out for burgers when you’ve got steak at home?” casting that underscores the kamikaze lunacy of her and Samuel’s entanglement.
At the previous night’s screening of Babygirl, the London-born Dickinson − a former marine cadet best known for the 2022 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness − was able to show the film to his family. (His mother is a hairdresser and his father a social worker, making him a rare success story in a profession now almost monopolised by the posh.)
“At first I was like: bit weird,” he says, recalling the experience of witnessing his parents watch him in bed with one of the great movie stars of the last 100 years. “But it’s not like we’re a family of prudes, so why not? And sex is not a subject we should shy away from, regardless of discomfort.”
Kidman, pulling a face of maternal horror, adds: “Well, my daughters aren’t seeing it.” She has two − 16-year-old Sunday Rose and 14-year-old Faith Margaret − with husband Keith Urban; her adopted children with former husband Tom Cruise, Isabella and Connor, are now 32 and 29 respectively, and can presumably watch what they like.
“But they’ve also declared that they don’t want to see it,” she says.
“Neither of them has any interest in seeing Mum like that.”
Kidman’s character Romy with her husband Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas. Photo: PA
So, exactly what is she like in this film? From To Die For to Dogville, Kidman has always exhibited a mile-wide fearless streak, but Babygirl spices that daring with her often under-sung comic talents, as seen in Moulin Rouge! Her performance might well bring her a second Oscar and/or Bafta; nominations for both next week seem likely.
Halina Reijn, Babygirl’s writer and director, has described the film as a “comedy of manners” – though as a former actor who was herself once directed (in Black Book) by Basic Instinct’s Paul Verhoeven, god-emperor of the erotic thriller, she knows the tradition in which she works.
For Kidman, who was born in Hawaii while her Australian parents were living there, but raised in the north Sydney suburbs, the now-outmoded genre was central to her cinematic upbringing. “They were just so much fun,” she says. “And they were so prominent when my tastes were being formed. I mean, they were playing the multiplexes; they were completely mainstream.”
Dickinson, on the other hand, was born in 1996, right at the moment erotic thrillers fell out of fashion.
“It was a gap in my filmography,” he confesses, explaining that Reijn sent him a revision guide. “But she was clear we weren’t making a pastiche, and our film was going to stand on its own.”
Babygirl certainly does that. One of the film’s boldest gambits is a raw and honest approach to depicting female pleasure: the decorous climax from Kidman with which it opens − call it a classic Hollywood orgasm − is, we soon discover, a feigned one. Later on, the real thing is shown to be far less picturesque, with all the scrunching and convulsing that cinemagoers are typically spared.
“And grunting!” Kidman adds enthusiastically. “Don’t forget the grunting.” At first, playing these moments terrified her: “That was all actually scary, and I said to Halina at the beginning how scared I was. But she was like, ‘I’ll get you there. It’ll be safe − but I want the embarrassment, I want the struggle.’ Because so much of Romy’s sexuality is caught up in her struggle to release. She can perform, but she can’t let go.
There was still an element of danger to it, even discomfort − and I think that’s good; we needed that
“And I think that’s a common thread that runs through a lot of women’s sexuality − what they feel it should be, versus what it actually is.”
On this point, Dickinson modestly declines to chime in. “For me, it’s difficult to speak about without sounding, quite frankly, under-qualified,” he says.
Nevertheless, Kidman found him a capable scene partner. “I didn’t even notice where the camera was half the time, because Harris and I were so at ease with one another, it didn’t feel like there was a quote-unquote ‘performance’ attached.”
And while the pair worked with an intimacy co-ordinator, Bridgerton’s Lizzy Talbot, Kidman stresses that spontaneity was still central.
“We didn’t rehearse too much; didn’t get to know each other beforehand. So there was none of the comfort between us that there is now. There was still an element of danger to it, even discomfort − and I think that’s good; we needed that,” she says.
She describes acting as “energy: the vibrations you feel between people. And while you can talk about it all you want, you can’t just intellectualise it − you’ve got to allow it.
“When I kiss the girl in the rave scene, that wasn’t scripted. When our clothes were coming off, we were getting buffeted around and almost trampled on the dancefloor; none of that was scripted, either.”
Not that she tends to watch her work back on the monitor while filming, “but here especially I would have felt too embarrassed”. At Babygirl’s Venice premiere, she recalls, “I remember covering my face at one point, and burying my head in Halina’s chest at another. Because it was a bit like, ‘Oh, gosh. I don’t want to watch myself doing this’.”
There are so many times in films where I can’t remember what I’ve done
Kidman talks about acting less as vocation than as instinct: when I bring up the play of emotions on her face that the camera captures during a particular close-up in Babygirl, she looks at a loss.
“It’s hard when I have to step outside and look at that stuff,” she says. “There are so many times in films where I can’t remember what I’ve done. A director will say, ‘Can you do that again?’ and I’m like, ‘What did I do?’ That’s where I lack the technique that’s required to break these things down rigorously and accurately.
“Because to me, acting is ephemeral. It’s being completely inside what my character is feeling. And being inside Romy, there was a lot of feeling humiliated, embarrassed, angry, desirous, and, yes, turned on. So it was about allowing all of those to just run through me.”
While she blushingly laughs off the suggestion, Dickinson admits that the transgressive fun of their on-screen fling is at least partly rooted in the yawning gap between their respective celebrity status.
“As in, ‘What is that little s*** doing to her?’,” he says. “Well, yeah. But I had to put all my admiration aside, because otherwise I’d have got caught up in the wrong headspace. Part of Samuel’s thing is not to respect conventional workplace hierarchies. So I don’t think there was any other way for me to enter into this role than by just not caring about it.”
Nicole Kidman on the red carpet in 2001. Photo: Reuters
Of course, male-female power dynamics have always been central to erotic thrillers, and Babygirl makes great mischief with how much these have shifted in recent years − and how much they have not. Samuel is younger, Romy is older; she’s the married boss, he’s the footloose employee.
Compared with 1987’s Fatal Attraction, all of this is novel. But in the post-MeToo era, there’s an advantage in being able to paint oneself as the exploited party − or at least threaten to do so − which wasn’t available to Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest.
Does Kidman think that, these days, an age gap gives an older woman power over a younger man?
“Oh, almost certainly not!” she says. “Because, you know, youth is power. In our film, Samuel holds a lot of the power in their relationship, even though Romy is powerful within her workplace. Her age gives her less power when she’s with a young man. The only power she really has is that she can fire him, but she doesn’t know whether she wants that. Part of her journey is that her desires, the things she’s looking for sexually, she’s very confused by, and can’t state them outright.”
I think sex is still not explored enough on screen, particularly in American films
In an interview she gave in her 20s, Kidman said she was drawn to playing “sexually frustrated older women”, which arguably makes Babygirl the culmination of her life’s work. Why did the idea appeal to her back then?
“Because I think sex is still not explored enough on screen, particularly in American films. European cinema is a different matter; it’s just part of what they do. But America, England, Australia − we don’t talk about it, yet it’s a huge part of who we are as human beings,” she says.
“Just as I’ve circled themes of loss, trauma and grief throughout my career, I’ve also circled sexual roles − maybe because we don’t discuss these things because they’re uncomfortable. So I’m a huge proponent for throwing things out there and seeing how they land.”
Babygirl’s brazen confronting of taboos makes it a sister film of sorts to Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, which rivals it in complexity and strangeness. In that film, Kidman plays a young widow who becomes convinced that a 10-year-old boy is the reincarnation of her late husband. At its 2004 Venice premiere, it caused an outcry, not least because of a scene in which Kidman’s Anna is seen sharing a bath with the child.
Even two decades later, that bruising experience made her anxious about unveiling Babygirl at the same festival, “because it could have easily been another train wreck. But actually the reception was beyond my dreams.”
Would she play the Birth bath scene in the same way today?
“I think so,” she says, after pausing to reflect. “I always felt lucky to be in a Jonathan Glazer film, because he makes so few of them” − only two have followed since: Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest − “and I thought it was a shame that Birth became reduced to the controversy around that scene initially.” She describes Glazer’s film as “a dissertation on the magical thinking of grief − how there’s no set time frame in which we overcome it, and that when you’re in a place of such pain, you can grasp on to things that are so outlandish”.
That’s what made its surreality ring true to her, she says, the cup of tea poured by her co-star still cooling, untouched, at her side.
“As human beings, we want to make sense of everything we can’t control. Which it turns out is pretty much everything.” (© Telegraph Media Group Holdings Ltd)
‘Babygirl’ is in cinemas now
