Nicole Kidman said filming Babygirl’s intimate scenes left her burned out and wanting a break from being touched. In the 2024 film directed by Halina Reijn, she performs a scene in which her character fakes an orgasm with Antonio Banderas, then submits to Harris Dickinson.
Discussing the experience in a Sun interview quoted on October 24, 2024, Kidman said, “I don’t want to orgasm any more.” Her trust in Reijn mattered: in a Sun interview transcribed on October 31, 2024, she said “the only way I could do this was with her.” In a Yahoo Entertainment interview published on December 18, 2024, Reijn said Kidman “immediately said, ‘I will do everything that is in that script.’”
The production used intimacy coordinator Lizzy Talbot. In her January 10, 2025 Telegraph interview, Kidman said they “didn’t rehearse too much” and wanted the “discomfort.” Dickinson described a process in which a coordinator established boundaries before he and Kidman “did our own thing,” in his October 23, 2024 Variety interview.
Kidman’s earlier work had also required negotiating exposure. For Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), opposite her then-husband Tom Cruise, she secured a contractual right to review the nude scenes before they entered the film. She approved them all.
“I didn’t say no to any of it,” she told The New York Times Magazine on October 5, 2020. In that interview, she also said “there needs to be a place where you can go, I’m not going to be exploited.” Cruise told Salon on July 15, 1999, that Kubrick shot their opening sex sequence without a crew.
On Big Little Lies (2017), her scenes with Alexander Skarsgård included sex that became violent. Kidman told Vulture in March 2017 that director Jean-Marc Vallée worked without rehearsals; a double demonstrated a move for the finale, which she then performed herself.
Speaking to W, in an interview reported on June 29, 2017, she said, “I felt very exposed and vulnerable and deeply humiliated at times.” She recalled Vallée covering her with a towel while she lay on a bathroom floor in torn underwear.