17 “Babygirl” Behind-The-Scenes Facts That’ll Make You Laugh, Sweat, And Clutch Your Pearls
Some of the sex scenes were so intense Nicole Kidman said she had to stop filming at times.
Babygirl is a new erotic thriller from A24 starring Nicole Kidman as a powerful CEO, Romy, who puts her career and family on the line when she begins a tumultuous affair with a much younger intern, Samuel, played by Harris Dickinson.
A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection
Rounding out the cast is Antonio Banderas as Jacob, Romy’s husband; Sophie Wilde as Esme, Romy’s assistant; Esther McGregor as Isabel, Romy and Jacob’s teenage daughter; and Vaughan Reilly as Nora Mathis, their younger daughter.
Written and directed by Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies), the film is something of a modern twist on Fatal Attraction. In this case, the roles are reversed, and the vibe is less horror/thriller and more self-exploration/liberation, and, of course, shown through a female perspective.
But all you ~really~ need to know is that the film is a hot and wild ride, the music is fantastic, Nicole Kidman is at the top of her game (in fact, the whole cast is A+++), and I would not recommend watching this with your parents, LOL.
Niko Tavernise /© A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection
And if you want a deeper dive, here are some fascinating and entertaining behind-the-scenes facts about the film I learned:
FYI: There are no major spoilers ahead. But there are some small plot details mentioned.
1. An early inspiration for the film came from a friend of filmmaker Halina Reijn. The friend told her about a woman who, throughout her 25-year marriage, had never experienced an orgasm with her husband.
Niko Tavernise /© A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection
2. But she was also inspired by the iconic sexual thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s like Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, 9 1/2 Weeks, and Indecent Proposal.
Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
Reijn told the Hollywood Reporter, “Those movies kind of told me that these darker desires were okay, even though, at the end of the movie, the woman mostly gets punished. This film is my answer, my female answer, to those films.”
3. Reijn, a retired actress, actually worked with Paul Verhoeven (who directed Basic Instinct) on his film Black Book. And Reijn said Verhoeven himself was also a major source of inspiration while making Babygirl.
TriStar / courtesy Everett Collection
She explained, “Paul Verhoeven always told me I could only make a movie if I had a specific question. For this story, I wondered: Are we animals, or are we civilized? Can we make peace with the animal inside of us? Is it possible for the different parts of ourselves to co-exist and, in turn, for us to love our whole selves without shame?”
4. Even though she’s a veteran actor, Kidman said working on Babygirl was an “utterly new experience.”
A24 / Via youtube.com
“I’ve made many sexual films, but this is different,” Kidman said. “Doing this subject matter in the hands of the woman that wrote the script, that’s directing it and is a really great actress herself — we became one in a weird way, which I’d never had with a director before. When you’re working with a woman on this subject matter, you can share everything with each other.”
5. And she was so “in” her performance for the film that she said she doesn’t clearly remember the experience.
A24 / Via youtube.com
“I can’t tell you the details of it because I was so in the performance, I staggered out of it at the end going, what just happened? It feels a bit like a dream. I think back on it, and I’m like, I was in the middle of winter in New York, I was down dancing in a rave, just taking my clothes off. What was I doing?” she said.
6. One funny example of Kidman being too “in the zone” while filming was when she hailed a real cab on the street (a cab that was not meant to be there), got in, and in character, told the driver where to go. The crew had to stop the taxi and get her out.
A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection
7. Although there was an intimacy coordinator, Lizzy Talbot, to help guide Kidman and her costar Harris Dickinson on set, the two actors still “did their own thing.”
A24 / Via youtube.com
Dickinson told Variety, “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.”
8. Some of the sex scenes were actually so intense Kidman said she had to stop filming at times. She explained, “There were times when we were shooting where I was like, ‘I don’t want to [simulate] orgasm anymore. Don’t come near me. I hate doing this. I don’t care if I am never touched again in my life! I’m over it.’”
A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection
9. Dickinson and Kidman were initially paired together over a Zoom call. According to Reijn, they easily fell into the “see-sawing power games” of their characters.
A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection
10. And the two actors “made a point that they didn’t want to get to know each other too well” before production began, said Reijn.
A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection
11. One of the big reasons Reijn cast Antonio Banderas as Romy’s husband was because she felt it was incredibly important that it was someone “very, very attractive and very masculine so that it would not be about that at all. It is [about] her existential crisis.”
A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection
12. Reijn said she “fell in love” with actor Sophie Wilde (Esme) after seeing her performance in the horror film Talk to Me.
A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection
“I saw this movie, and I lost it,” Reijn recalled of first seeing Wilde’s performance. “This actress is just a discovery. She has a range that is unheard of.”
13. Kidman and Wilde really bonded while filming because they spent a lot of time talking about their backgrounds growing up in Australia.
A24 / Via youtube.com
In fact, they became such good friends, when Wilde recently won an award for her role in Boy Swallows Universe, Kidman texted her, “OMG!!!” to congratulate her.
14. The (soon to become iconic) dance scene in the hotel, which is fairly long, impressively took only a couple of takes to film.
15. Apparently, Dickinson and the film’s cinematographer, Jasper Wolf, were basically “dancing together” while shooting that scene, too. Reijn joked, while miming the motion of the camera swaying, “Them two were dancing and me and Nicole were watching.”
16. Reijn reached out directly to musician Sky Ferreira to ask if she’d be willing to submit a song for the film. Ferreira told Gold Derby, “I assumed they had a lot of people pitching songs. I get approached to license my music, but I never get approached to write a song for a film, so I was pretty excited.”
Jc Olivera / WireImage
That song is called “Leash,” and you can listen to it here.
17. Finally, in a kind of “in the know” Easter egg, some of the filming was actually done at A24’s office in New York. The production company’s real-life space served as the setting of Romy’s robotics company for several scenes.
Unless otherwise noted, facts for this post were sourced from the film’s production notes.
