EXCLUSIVE: Nicole Kidman says she was smitten the moment filmmaker and writer Halina Reijn revealed the name of a movie she was writing. “I love the title. So, I was like, ‘Oh! I’d like to be a Babygirl!’”
The Oscar-winner says that when she read the script, she was “completely sort of hypnotized” by its “very modern look at women’s sexuality, but also just desire and who we are authentically as people and whether we’re loved for who we are.”
Babygirl, which plays in theaters nationwide from Dec. 25, has been having that hypnotizing effect on festival and awards season audiences as well, ever since A24 world-premiered Reijn’s picture at the Venice Film Festival, where Kidman’s red-hot blistering performance won the Lido’s Volpi Cup for Best Actress.
The film does seem to have ignited some sense of “fire and liberation” in people “which is what the film’s about,” she explains.
Director Halina Reijn and Nicole Kidman on the set of Babygirl. (A24)
In the movie, Kidman disappears into the slender silhouette of Romy, the ground-breaking, high-powered CEO of a packaging company that uses an AI system she designed.
Romy has everything, or so it seems.
A husband named Jacob, who’s in the Phwoar category with a capital P – easy to pull off since he’s played by Antonio Banderas; two teenage daughters; a splashy Manhattan apartment; the obligatory house in the country, and a wardrobe full of power coats, a form of apparel that’s become something of a signature costume for Kidman of late.
But the woman who “has everything” doesn’t know how to be her true self. She keeps pushing the boundaries for “this progressive exploration” of sexual satisfaction. It’s a role that upends the traditional dynamic where a man usually dictates the narrative, especially in a movie of this genre.
Into this mix comes Samuel, played with a smouldering intensity by Harris Dickinson (Blitz, Triangle of Sadness), an intern who chooses Romy, “the older woman,” to mentor him.
They soon become the object of each other’s desire and they hold very little back.
Both Banderas and Dickinson “support the trajectory of the woman” and that’s as rare as hen’s teeth.
“But they’re really great roles too. I think the film wouldn’t be the film it is without those two men. Having Antonio as my husband, and he’s so appealing,” Kidman says with a laugh.
“That’s why it’s not true in terms of, ‘Okay, now this terrible husband.’ He’s a lovely husband, a delicious husband,” she says, exhaling.
Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in Babygirl (2024).
Niko Tavernise/A24/Courtesy Everett Collection
“And then there’s this extraordinary Harris, who just sort of appears as Samuel, and some people have said, ‘Well, maybe it’s a dream, the whole film. Maybe it’s all a fantasy.’ Which I thought was interesting. And it’s certainly up for interpretation,” she teases.
Reijn, a Dutch-born actress turned filmmaker, producer and writer, is “obsessed,” as Kidman says, with the erotic thriller genre that flooded into theaters in the 1980s and ’90s. Movies like Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Body Heat, Body Double, Crimes of Passion and so on.
“And those films, they were entertaining, I mean, we all went and saw them … but, hold on! Where’s the story that follows the other thing?” she wonders.
“Halina’s obsessed with those films,” says Kidman. “And so, she has always had the idea of doing a thriller from that genre and making it with the female gaze. It’s those stories but told through a female gaze. And that’s what she was determined to do. Whether anyone would’ve given her the money was what she was worried about. And then A24, glorious A24 got involved.
“They’re the right place for this movie,” she says, noting that they already had a relationship with her because of her 2022 film Bodies Bodies Bodies.
Kidman’s own relationship with Reijn began several years ago after she saw the director’s 2019 film Instinct. “I knew I had to work with such an emerging talent.”
An earlier “loose” plan to work together didn’t pan out, but they kept in constant touch when “she was writing this film called Babygirl. And I was like, ‘Huh, Babygirl!’ And then she sent it to me. I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is so up my alley!’”
“You just don’t get roles like this,” she says with a sigh.
Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in Babygirl (2024). (A24/Courtesy Everett Collection)
“I mean,” Kidman explains, “I think in terms of the exploration of a woman in the height of her power, and then the yearning, the existential crisis that she’s having, that she’s almost unaware that she’s having, the patterns in her life, and the way in which she she’s formed her life — and she’s going, ‘Oh, this it. This is now my life.’”
And it’s rare in a film of this nature “to have the protagonist be female, and only her story followed. You don’t follow anybody else’s, which is unusual,” she notes.
Importantly, Kidman observes, “Halina is totally committed to the female journey in this film, but not in a tortuous way. I think the film is not tortuous, which is what so many are. There’s no destroying of the woman. There’s no punishing of the woman. It’s her exploration and it’s her journey.”
Yet, Kidman stresses, it’s a film that plays to both men and women “and all genders, because you’re going, ‘Okay, it’s relatable in the metaphoric way to anyone that’s exploring their desires, their yearnings, and their true authentic self, and their secrets and the way in which they’re behaving.’”
Kidman says she was captivated making the movie because “it’s speaking directly from Helena’s voice because she’s the writer and the director, which is fantastic. Yes, she’s very much in control. She edited the film obsessively and I couldn’t believe how she just works seven days a week, 24/7,” she says with an admiring twinkle in her eye.
“I love her,” Kidman adds. “Because she’s also making a mark for herself now as a director and a writer. And she gave me a role that I’ve never had in my life. It was really at this stage in my life to go: ‘This came out of nowhere and I’ve never experienced anything like it, probably never will again.’ And it was just beautiful being intertwined with her and creating the story and the performance.”
Her reverence speaks to Kidman’s desire to work with and encourage female directors and writers.
It’s not idle chat either. Kidman made her objective clear years ago, that she wanted to work with a female director every eight months. In recent years, that scope has been expanded to something like two to three times per year.
This year alone, Kidman has shot or released Babygirl; Welcome To Holland directed by Mimi Cave, which was filmed in Nashville, and is due for release in 2025; the gripping limited TV drama Expats, directed by Lulu Wang; and Susanne Bier’s The Perfect Couple. And Vicky Jenson directed the recently released Spellbound. Meanwhile, Andrea Arnold shot seven of the 14 episodes for the new season of Big Little Lies.
In February, Kidman will play a small role in David E. Kelley’s TV drama series Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which also stars Elle Fanning as Margo, a young mother who determines to solve her money troubles. Michelle Pfeiffer plays her mother, a Hooters waitress.
Kidman notes the eight-part series, adapted from Rufi Thorpe’s novel, will be directed by Dearbhla Walsh, who has been busy of late on Bad Sisters. “So once again, it’s like putting women at the front and center,” says Kidman, beaming.
Kidman’s producing; Elle and Dakota Fanning are among the show’s executive producers.
Kidman and Sandra Bullock are awaiting a new screenplay draft for a sequel to 1998’s Practical Magic, in which the two stars play sisters witches. “Right now we’re sort of in the midst of honing the scripts,” but she’s hopeful that the production will come together. “I love working with Sandy.”
She also “loves” witches.
In between our conversations, in person in London, and over Zoom from Nashville, Kidman had been to see Wicked and Gladiator II “in the theater, in a cinema,” a point she stresses.
She has a thing about witches. “Honestly, I was enraptured by Wicked. It was gorgeous. I loved it,” she trills.
Years ago, when Stephen Daldry was on the Wicked project, he idly toyed with the idea of asking Kidman to be in it but nothing came of it. In any event, Kidman knew nothing of Daldry’s idea when I broach it.
“Nobody could have played those roles other than Cynthia and Ariana,” she believes, and I agree.
We both recall seeing Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel as the original Glinda and Elphaba during early previews of Wicked on Broadway back in 2003.
What is it about her and sorceresses? “They’re magical creatures, right?” she says.
And they’re not necessarily always bad, as Wicked has proved. “Absolutely not all bad. Naughty sometimes, but not bad,” she allows.
Our revels are over when she’s called back on set in Nashville to continue filming Scarpetta, the Amazon TV adaptation of Patricia Cornwall’s bestselling novels about crime-solving forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, with Jamie Lee Curtis playing her sister and Ariana DeBose as her niece.