Nicole Kidman has said her new film Babygirl is so “exposing” that she is afraid to watch it with an audience in the cinema.
The erotic thriller sees Kidman playing marketing executive Romy, who embarks on a forbidden romance with Harris Dickinson’s significantly younger intern Samuel.
The A24 production, directed by Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies), receives its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Friday (August 30) and will be in cinemas in the US on Christmas Day.
The film features frank depictions of female sexual fantasies and Kidman told Vanity Fair in a new interview that there is “something in my going, okay, this was made for the big screen and to be seen with people. But then I’m like, that’s a high-wire act. I’m not sure I have that much bravery.”
“Maybe I will see it that way,” she added. “I’ve made some films that are pretty exposing, but not like this.”
Speaking about some of the movie’s most explicit scenes, she continued: “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 being.”
Babygirl is far from the first risqué film in Kidman’s career, and last month the actor reflected on her casting in Stanley Kubrick’s racy 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, saying she believes she was chosen for the role of Alice because of her “provocative nature”.
“I’m quite up-front and Alice becomes quite up-front, particularly when she was stoned … although that wasn’t me when I was stoned,” she said. “I was just naturally like that. Up-front.”
She also spoke about her daughter Sunday’s reaction to the scene in the film in which she gets stoned: “She said, ‘Mom, that was good’,” Kidman recalled.
Another of Kidman’s upcoming titles is The Perfect Couple, a mystery drama series that is an adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s 2018 novel and is coming to Netflix on September 5. The show follows Eve Hewson’s Amelia, who is about to marry into a wealthy family, to the disapproval of the family’s matriarch Greer, played by Kidman.
Elsewhere, Kidman has given an update on the status of the third season of Big Little Lies, which she revealed back in November last year was in the works. “We’re moving fast and furious,” she said in June. “Liane [Moriarty] is delivering the book. We’re in good shape.”