Between her experience on Babygirl and her mother’s death, the star has come to understand a lot about women in unfulfilled lives.
Nicole Kidman’s eyes widened. “Haven’t you been to the Rockettes?” she asked. “I go every year. Oh yeah, I’m obsessed!”
Over celery root soup at the Empire Diner in Manhattan in early December, the 57-year-old Oscar winner regaled me with stories about the high-kicking Christmas spectacular, which she had attended the night before with her children and husband, singer Keith Urban: “I was saying to my husband, ‘Why do we love it so much?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s a memory. You’re remembering the kid in you.’”
Lately, Kidman has been thinking a lot about this sort of thing, tracing her life and career as part of a continuum. Her new film, Babygirl, is one such reconnection: Though she has recently been seen in splashy streaming series like The Perfect Couple and Lioness: Special Ops, it marks a return to the kind of risky, auteur-driven film-making she used to be acclaimed for.
Directed by Halina Reijn, Babygirl stars Kidman as Romy, a put-together CEO with a doting husband (Antonio Banderas) but an unsatisfying sex life: afraid to explore her desire to be dominated, Romy finds her kink fulfilled by a young intern (Harris Dickinson) with whom she embarks on a tumultuous affair. “It’s very exposing,” Kidman admitted of the sexually charged film. When she watched it for the first time with an audience, she felt so naked and vulnerable that she buried her head in Reijn’s chest.
Babygirl could earn Kidman her sixth Oscar nomination and has already won her the prestigious Volpi Cup for best actor at the Venice Film Festival in September, though Kidman had to miss that ceremony after the death of her mother, Janelle, at 84. The two were quite close and her passing has put Kidman in a contemplative mood: over the course of our conversation, she discussed not just Babygirl but also her mother’s unrealised ambitions and the difficulties that thwart female fulfilment, tackling those topics in a surprisingly unguarded way.
“The nature of being an actor is the need to be able to stay free and open and vulnerable,” she told me. “Stay like that, take the armour off: Here I am.”
These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Q: What kind of reactions have you gotten to Babygirl?
A: Everything. I’ve become like some sex therapist, and I’m like, “I’m not equipped!” But people are fascinated, want to talk about it, turned on by it, disturbed by it.
Q: With a movie about sex, sometimes people measure its success by whether it turns them on or doesn’t. But there’s a lot more than that at play with this movie.
A: It’s about an existential crisis. Yes, it’s about (sex), but it’s also about a woman going, “Who am I?” She’s in a very turbulent state because she’s not quite sure who she is or what she really wants, and that’s a very relatable thing for people. As much as it has the female gaze, it’s also genderless: I’ve got so many friends that have seen it, men, who go, “It’s about secrets,” or “It’s about having to stay in the closet,” or “It’s about how I could never express myself.” There’s something very liberating about it.
Q: How was your bond with Halina? You’ve made some sexually explicit films before, like Eyes Wide Shut and The Paperboy, but this time you’re tackling that material with a female film-maker.
A: It feels really safe, like you’re with your best girlfriend. She and I are so close, and it’s actually now a horrible feeling because she’s going to move on to somebody else, probably. It’s awful as an actor, because you’re like, “Oh no, I don’t get to be your babygirl anymore. You won’t be lavishing your love on me.”
Q: I’ve always wondered how that feels for actors. You have these really intense experiences with your directors and fellow cast members and then abruptly go your separate ways. It’s like the end of summer camp or something.
A: But it is! No one talks about that. You never know: maybe the paths cross again, you hope. But you have to be chosen again and now because she’s so white hot, it’ll be like, “Nah, I’m done with you.” (Laughs.)
Q: How does a film-maker earn your trust to make something like Babygirl?
A: I have an innate trust. My mum would always say, “You trust too much, Nicole, stop it,” but I’m always trusting until I get burned, and then I go back again. I like intimacy, which is probably why I say I hate to give Halina up now: You form these friendships with people that go far beyond the work. With actors, too: You’re looking in another person’s eyes, you are there. When you’re being held and going through something, you are going through it together. That is a genuine, real connection.
Q: And your body is feeling it for real?
A: And my heart, and my brain. It’s all there, and I will stop doing it if that doesn’t keep going. It’s the beautiful part of what we do.
Q: Does that ever tax you? Babygirl requires you to be very exposed.
A: It’s stimulating, ultimately. People go, “It was a brave choice to do this.” I’m like, “No, it would have been devastating not to do it.” It would have been a very, very destructive thing to myself to not do it.
Q: It’s not easy to remain so vulnerable, though.
A: I’m probably too porous and too available – my husband says I don’t have enough shields and protection around me. My nature is a bit shy, but as I’ve grown more, I’ve had very, very deep conversations. Watching my mother go through the last 10 years of her life – a highly intellectual woman, going through the demise of her body but not her mind – it was an extraordinary path to partner her through that. I was her firstborn daughter and her confidante, so it was a very deep experience to be mothering young girls (she has two daughters with Urban and an older daughter and son with her ex-husband, Tom Cruise) and having my mother pass through the last decade of her life and being very verbose about it.
Q: What did she tell you?
A: It was frustrating as her body gave way at different times and she couldn’t do the things she wanted. The night-time calls were the most interesting because they were at 3am and we talked sometimes for two hours about what it means to grow old, the beauty of that and the painfulness of it. She was very cognisant of what it meant and had a lot of frustration and anger. You know the poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night?” That was very much her.
Q: Were you in Venice when you found out she had died?
A: I had just got off the plane there, and it all sort of came as an avalanche. As Halina says in Babygirl, the avalanche is coming. Well, my mother’s avalanche came.
Q: Mortality keeps coming up when I speak to people about this film. When I asked your co-star Harris Dickinson if he worried how he would be perceived after Babygirl, he said, “Why would I? We’re all going to die some day.” That put things in perspective.
A: That’s so the youth speaking. And then Antonio is fascinating because you have the opposite: He had a major heart attack and survived it, so he has an extraordinary look on life. Talk about vitality! He is so in the world and emotional. I want to sing Antonio’s praises because he showed up on the set so open and willing and supportive of Halina. We have incredible men in this film, which has to be heralded because that isn’t a given. Would there have been men that didn’t want to do it? Probably, because it’s very sexual, and that’s confronting.
Q: Was it confronting to you?
A: Yeah, because it’s incredibly deep. I feel like I’ve exposed part of myself that’s very private.
Q: Have you felt that way in the past when you’ve done material that had a sexual charge to it?
A: Not as much as this. Big Little Lies, at times, because those things were very, very harsh, and I was bruised and battered. With this, my heart is on screen. It’s different. I had to go to another place to do it, where I just went, “Don’t think of this being seen by anybody, think of it as deeply intimate and only here now.”
Q: I heard that you plunged so deeply into this role that during one scene, you unexpectedly hailed a cab while in character.
A: And got in! The first AD (assistant director) was like, “Get her back.”
Q: If you are that able to surprise yourself while performing, does it also surprise you to watch the performance later?
A: Mm-hmm. In a confronting way. But I always say I’m not the judge of my performance. There is no judge, there’s no right or wrong.
Q: The movie is about liberating yourself from shame. How are you able to do that as an actor who goes to risky or explicit places in her work?
A: I’ve always had this crazy commitment. I found my place in the world through literature and theatre when I was younger: I would go to the theatre on weekends and express many different things that would percolate within me. It’s been my comfort, my saviour and my solace. It’s saved my life. So with the loss of my mum, I go, “Where does all this emotion go?” I can put it into a little box or I can actually put it into an artistic voice. There’s a reason to be doing these things, and it connects me to the world: What I’m going through, someone else has gone through.
Q: If you could go back 15 years and have a sneak peek at what was to come in your career, what would you make of it?
A: I’d be shocked.
Q: What would shock you?
A: That I’m still here and there’s a vitality to the work because you never know. Directors have to choose to work with you – so do writers, other actors. You really are not in the driver’s seat and there’s so much that’s uncontrollable, so to just be doing it still at this capacity is like, “What?” I wouldn’t have predicted that.
Q: In 2017, you promised to work with a female director every 18 months. These days, most of your work is with female film-makers.
A: There’s incredible satisfaction in seeing people’s careers ignite because you got behind them. I know I always bring it back to my family, but my mother came from a generation of women that didn’t get what she wanted. Part of her last 10 years was regret – she didn’t have the career she wanted, she didn’t have the journey in terms of her intellect that she could have had. There’s probably some deep-seated need in me to fulfil that for others because I didn’t like seeing that. It was a devastating time for me.
Q: To some degree, Babygirl is about that: Though Romy ostensibly has everything, there’s something important that she desperately needs and doesn’t even feel she can ask for.
A: But she’s in a position of power, whereas so many other women are now in their 80s and didn’t have the opportunities that they should have had. So how do you change it? By not letting it happen again, making sure that next generation doesn’t get that. It’s very, very satisfying to be able to go, “I’ve got a little bit of power,” or, “If people will invest in me, I want to be able to transfer that to you and create work.”
And I’m not just talking actors, I’m talking crew, because it’s tough. Right now in the industry, I know it seems like a lot of things are being made, but they’re not. That’s had a massive impact on crews. Right now, I’m doing a show in Tennessee and they’re all working. I can’t tell you what that feels like. It’s emotional, because you go, “Oh my gosh, I’m in a position where if I do this, it could be so cool.”
Q: Earlier in your career, you toggled between big studio movies and smaller, more adventurous indies. These days, does it feel like big streaming series have taken the place of those studio movies? When The Perfect Couple hits No 1 on Netflix, maybe it can offer the same sort of career lift that helps get a film like Babygirl made.
A: That was incredible, to have that ignite at the same time as Babygirl, and they’re so different. People saw Perfect Couple who are not going to see Babygirl and haven’t even heard of it. There’s very few things now that hit the zeitgeist, but there’s many things that work in particular areas, so you better find your love for what you do and hope that people find it. My next thing is I want to do a play, because it’s small.
Q: Do you think it would stay small if you were starring in it?
A: Well, I want to treat it like it’s small so that I stay brave. The more you go, “Oh my gosh, this is going to be judged by millions of people,” that’s when you go weak. But if you just go, “Well, it’s small” – like I did with Babygirl – who knows?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kyle Buchanan
Photographs by: Thea Traff
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