She’s one of the busiest actresses in Hollywood, with nearly 100 credits to her name and a handful of film and TV projects this season alone, including A Perfect Couple, Lioness, Spellbound, and Babygirl — which marks her 20th Golden Globe nomination.
But Kidman insists that even at this point in her storied career, it’s not easy to find compelling roles like Babygirl. “Getting something made is hard, let alone something that’s complicated and unusual and exciting and not run-of-the-mill,” she tells Gold Derby. “It’s never what people think.”
That’s what drew her to director Halina Reijn’s screenplay, a sexy, no-holds-barred thriller about a high-powered CEO named Romy who risks everything for an affair with a handsome young intern played by Harris Dickinson. “It was so captivating, and I hadn’t seen a woman’s sexuality portrayed like that,” says Kidman. “Halina was adamant that she wanted it to be ‘radically honest’ — as she put it — about the ways in which a woman finds her freedom and expresses what she’s feeling.”
Samuel’s arrival on the scene sends Romy spiraling in a way she could have never predicted — and the challenge of playing that was something Kidman had never seen on-screen before. “It’s a deep look at a woman’s psychology and her secrets and her shame and her desire and her yearning and her wanting to be what other people want her to be,” she says.
Critics have hailed Kidman’s work as “one of her top performances in a career built on risk-taking”; “Kidman is in spectacular form, swinging from outrage to fear to ravenously lustful consent,” wrote another. She also earned this year’s top honors for Best Actress from the National Board of Review.
In recent years, Kidman made a commitment to work with female directors; the creative collaboration continued with Reijn, as the two worked closely on shaping Romy’s character development. “It was like sitting with your best girlfriend and just sharing secrets,” she says. “It was really exciting, working with a woman like that. That’s never happened, in terms of deep exploration.” She credits Reijn’s European roots and her classical training with her willingness to push limits on-screen. “It was a union of two women going, OK, let’s do this together.”
For her part, Kidman wanted to be sure we saw Romy as more than just a one-dimensional woman. “I wanted to be able to capture her interior life, and not just the lines of the script,” she says. “There were times when I was licking milk out of the saucer and I’m thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ But that’s what Romy is thinking, too. So anything I’m feeling, Romy’s feeling. We became very intertwined.”
Meanwhile, Reijn brought a more freewheeling filmmaking style to the set, insisting the actors laugh, or cry, never letting them know where the cameras were for most of the filming. Kidman trusted her enough to never watch the monitors to see what was being captured.
“I want to be there, I want to be present, not censoring myself,” she says.
Kidman has plumbed the depths of difficult physical relationships on-screen before. “I circle this subject matter more than I realize,” she admits with a laugh. But in contrast to the brutality of Big Little Lies, “This is about the ability to settle within who you are and feel that you can still be loved,” she says. She points to the confession scene, where Romy admits the affair to her husband, Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas, where she tells him, “I’ve tried to be what you want me to be, and I can’t.”
Says Kidman, “I think that’s a deeply relatable feeling, and that’s probably why people of all ages and all different genders are responding to the film. I love that.”
