Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson don’t hold back in their upcoming erotic thriller “Babygirl.”
How could they?
In the film, written and directed by Halina Reijn, Kidman plays the CEO of a tech company who has a very kinky affair with a much younger intern, played by Dickinson. Kidman won the best actress award at the Venice International Film Festival in August for her work in the A24 movie.
Of course, when it came to the most explicit and kinkiest scenes in the movie, an intimacy coordinator, Lizzie Talbot, helped the guide the two. “We’d have a discussion with the intimacy coordinator and then Nicole and I kind of did our own thing with it once we set the parameters of what we were both comfortable with,” Dickinson told me Friday at a “Babygirl” screening at the London West Hollywood hotel. “The intimacy coordinator is saying, ‘What are you comfortable with, what do you want as a director, what are you comfortable doing from that vision? They’re facilitating that and doing it very delicately without interrupting the actual scene.”
The evening after the screening at the Academy Museum Gala, I asked Kidman what she found most challenging about the movie. She laughed, “The whole thing,” but then added, “Actually doing it justice and trying to be open and raw and available each day in every which way to explore. Because the nature of that film, it was either going to be completely vulnerable and exposed, or you were going to be protected, and then the thing wouldn’t connect. When I met with Helena, and we talked through it, I was just like, ‘Just give us a safe space,’ and then, ‘Please don’t make me look like a fool.’”
In one scene, Dickinson is practically naked and dancing in a hotel room to George Michael’s “Father Figure.” Reijn offered him no rehearsals beforehand. “That was just me moving,” Dickinson said, laughing. “Halina put the song and said, ‘Just dance.’ So I just had a little groove. Maybe I had a little whiskey before. But it was embarrassing.”
Dickinson said he was “pinching” himself every day about co-starring in a movie with Kidman. “Subtly, I kept asking her things like, ‘What was it like working with Stanley Kubrick?’ I was there always like poking at the fact that she is this monolithic figure in cinema.”
Kidman proved to be anything but a standoffish Hollywood star. “She is like the most comforting, warm performer to work across from,” Dickinson said. “She sets the tone on set, and she makes it so easy to be vulnerable and to be funny, because she is so daring. He’s so brave, and she does stuff, and you’re like, ‘What the fuck is that?’ You can’t even think of it.
“And she’s just got this innate sense of playfulness,” he continued. “And when you have that on set, everything’s so easy.”
