Inside Nicole Kidman’s Erotic Drama Baby girl: “What Have I Just Done?”

 

💓The Oscar winner gives a fearless performance in A24’s new film, but she’s still nervous about sharing it: “This is something you do and hide in your home videos.”

Nicole Kidman has still not seen Baby girl, 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 Baby girl 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.

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.”

Baby girl stars Kidman as Romy, a powerful New York business executive who’s seemingly balancing professional success and personal fulfilment in her marriage to a theatre 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 onscreen 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 fuelled 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 Baby girl 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.” 💓