A24 released a steamy second trailer for its upcoming film Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman as Romy, a CEO having a torrid affair with her much younger employee, Samuel, played by The Iron Claw‘s Harris Dickinson. The film was written and directed by Halina Reijn, who previously worked with the studio on the 2022 comedy thriller Bodies Bodies Bodies. Antonio Banderas also stars in Babygirl, which hits theaters on Christmas Day.
Numerous critics have hailed the performane as one of Nicole Kidman’s best, and one that is a seeming shoo-in for a Best Actress Oscar nomination, Indiewire reports. Director Reijn even said that watching Kidman act was akin to witnessing “an exorcism.” The actress weighed in on the experience of making Babygirl as well, stating:
“It’s about desires, your inner thoughts, it’s about secrets, marriage, truth, power, consent, the language [around] sex… It’s told by a woman through her gaze, and that’s what it made it so unique. Suddenly, I was going to be in the hands of a woman with this material. It was very deep and very freeing to be able to share those things.”
On how audiences will interpret Babygirl, Kidman said:
“For each person that sees the film to interpret it, their interpretation will be wildly different… If we polled everyone in this room, they’d have a completely different reaction to Romy and the way she behaves. My connection to it is I want to examine human beings. I want to examine women onscreen, what it means to be human in all the facets of that and the labyrinth of that.”
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Kidman Had To “Abandon Everything” for ‘Babygirl’
Reijn is no stranger to psychosexual dramas centering on complicated women, having made her directorial debut in 2019 with Instinct, about a psychologist who becomes infatuated with a sex offender she’s treating in prison. The director is also an accomplished actress, and had a long career in the European film and television industry before making the jump to filmmaking.
This experience led Reijn to become an “actor’s director,” so to speak. In an interview with Complex following the release of Bodies Bodies Bodies, Reijn talked about the differences between acting and directing, and how her own career as an actress informed her directorial style:
“As an actress, I’ve encountered directors who say, ‘Just do whatever comes up in your mind,’ and that makes me feel incredibly unsafe. Being there with a very prepared plan and then saying, ‘But you also have the freedom to find your own ideas,’ is what I think an actor really likes. They have boundaries, but within those boundaries, they can find their own flow, where they can have an impulse that I can never think of as a director.”
Kidman appreciated this commitment to actor safety, telling People:
“There’s a sort of a jump off the cliff thing where you go, okay, I’m just going to abandon everything and explore this with the people that I trust in a genre that is already set, but hopefully we can explore new territory and especially with a female at the helm.”
Babygirl hits theaters on December 25.