Inside Nicole Kidman’s sexiest EVER film Babygirl as star spills on scenes ‘you’d usually hide in your home videos’
HER latest X-rated movie is sure to leave fans seriously shaken – and Nicole Kidman was all a-tremble, too, at its world premiere.
The Aussie beauty, 57, has revealed she was a bundle of nerves about how her most daring film would be received.
She need not have worried.
As the credits for Babygirl rolled at the Venice Film Festival on Friday, Nicole won a standing ovation of nearly SEVEN MINUTES — before critics hailed her “delicate, intimate and very, very deep” performance.
The blockbuster, in which she plays a married mum and company CEO who enters into an affair with a young intern, has been called the “21st Century Fatal Attraction” by one critic, while another summed it up as “tremendously horny”.
Babygirl is an “X-ray” of kink, teases Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn, who has sought to address the “huge orgasm gap” between men and women on the big screen and show “the beast living inside” which she feels has not been properly explored.
For Nicole — who earlier this year did a racy cover shoot for Elle magazine, where she reclined on a bed with one leg raised teasingly — it is another triumphant roll of the dice in a high-wire career that has flown in the face of Hollywood convention.
Having made her name with edgy hits such as erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, then gangster drama Dogville in 2003, in recent years she has led a host of A-listers swapping the silver screen for TV roles, all while also fiercely championing the work of female writers.
‘Leaves me exposed’
But Babygirl marks an explosive return to her risqué roots. She told Vanity Fair mag: “I’ve made some films that are pretty exposing, but not like this.”
Director Halina created the film’s lead character, Romy, especially for Nicole, who has been breaking the mould for decades — ever since her West End debut in 1998 hit The Blue Room, famously described by a reviewer as “pure theatrical Viagra”.
But despite her form, the no-holds-barred Babygirl shoot was like nothing else Nicole has tackled.
The film opens with Romy faking an orgasm while in the throes of passion with husband Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas, before sneaking off to get her real kicks watching a kinky video online.
Things only get raunchier from then on, with lashings of BDSM, more romps and Nicole strutting around close to fully naked.
Such eyefuls are increasingly rare in today’s sex-averse movies.
And filming was not easy for Nicole, who admitted there were days that “left me ragged”, but she felt “compelled” to complete the project.
Ahead of the premiere, she said: “This leaves me exposed and vulner-able and frightened when it’s given to the world. I was like, ‘I hope my hand’s not shaking’.”
Admitting to trepidation before the film’s full release in January, she added: “It’s like, ‘Golly, I’m doing this, and it’s 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.”
It comes 25 years after Nicole starred with then-husband Tom Cruise in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which was so sexually explicit that scenes were altered in post-production to ensure it could be released in cinemas.
But she credits boldness and spontaneity as key to her success.
Nicole once labelled herself a “wild card” when it comes to the film parts she picks — and even current husband Keith Urban, who she married in 2006, struggles to understand her choices.
She said: “I’m so spontaneous, sometimes to my detriment and sometimes my benefit, but it’s how I’ve always been.
“My husband never knows what I’m going to choose. And then he’ll ask me to explain why — and I can’t.”
Since her first bit-part acting role, in 1983 Aussie family-adventure film Bush Christmas, Nicole has studiously avoided the typecasting that can stifle a budding acting career.
Her filmography now ranges from portraying a sociopathic newsreader in 1995 satire To Die For, literary great Virginia Woolf in 2002 psycho-drama The Hours, which won her an Oscar and a sex worker in 2001 musical Moulin Rouge!, to donning Lycra for superhero films Batman Forever in 1995 and Aquaman in 2018.
Singer Sheryl Crow, who she counts as a friend, said: “She has jumped out of airplanes on numerous occasions — she is fearless. You see it in her acting choices.”
Disregard for convention started young. As a child, she convinced chaperones to let her audition for the musical Annie despite being over the height limit. Nicole, now a statuesque 5ft 11in, recalled being labelled “stalky” in her teens and was warned “you won’t have a career” because “you’re too tall”.
But the putdowns certainly never stopped her. She is now worth an estimated £190MILLION and insists: “Inner resilience as a human being, that’s the superpower.”
But she has often shunned blockbuster Hollywood productions for smaller films, including 2017 horror mystery The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, which she described as “a very low-budget film”.
Inner resilience as a human being, that’s the superpower.
Nicole Kidman
There was also Dogville, Danish director Lars von Trier’s experi-mental arthouse film, which polar-ised critics and featured shocking sexual violence.
Nicole describes her film choices as “a leap of faith” because she “trusts and believes” in the projects despite them not always being commercially wise or sensible for her career.
She added: “I really want to stay in a place of putting myself into discomfort — not feeling like, ‘I’ve done this, I’m very safe, I know how to do this’. The mistakes I’ve made have always involved people not matching the extreme artistic desire — when I’ve tried to be a bit more homogenised, or tried not to be as bold. When I’ve been guided into places that don’t suit what I am intrinsically — that’s when it doesn’t work out.”
In 2017, Nicole publicly pledged to work with a female director at least once every 18 months, in a bid to close the gender inequality gap.
She cited the fact that in 2016 women directed just 4.2 per cent of Hollywood films and 183 of 4,000 episodic TV series. In 2017, Nicole starred in US director Sofia Coppola’s thriller The Beguiled, about the US civil war.
She has also taken leading roles in Jane Campion’s 1996 period romance The Portrait Of A Lady and in the Kiwi director’s thriller TV series Top Of The Lake.
Nicole said: “There are very few trailblazers like Jane, she paved the way. There are not many females in her generation that are her equivalent. Which is sad because you can think of many, many men with that powerful, visionary language. That’s what we’re looking to change now. It has to happen.”
Her passion for promoting women in film has been inspired by her mum, a nurse who dared her to dream big in life.
“My achievements are her achievements,” Nicole said while accepting the Best Actress gong at the 2018 Golden Globes for Big Little Lies.
While on stage, she also praised her co-star and co-producer Reese Witherspoon and the long list of female talent including Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley and Zoe Kravitz.
Alongside Witherspoon, Kidman has been credited with kickstarting a surge of A-list stars moving away from Hollywood films to appear in TV series for streaming platforms.
It followed the success of Big Little Lies and then The Undoing, which became the most-watched show on HBO back in 2020, and Nine Perfect Strangers. This week, she is set to continue that run in new Netflix series The Perfect Couple.
Reflecting on her career to a magazine, Nicole said: “I went through a huge period of time when I didn’t have good choices.
“So many actors don’t have choices, and to even have a choice is an extraordinary opportunity.”
And despite her ‘vulnerability’ in Babygirl, she has no regrets.
She insisted: “I’m never going to shy away from that to my dying day. I’ll place myself in a vulnerable position, and see where that takes me.”