Nicole Kidman has admitted she felt 'vulnerable' filming multiple scenes of masturbation, plus a depiction of a submissive/dominant relationship, for her erotic new thriller Babygirl.
The actress, 57, said that her hands were shaking with nerves yesterday as the film was unveiled, making its global premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Rising British star Harris Dickinson has a career-making turn as Samuel, the intern who intuits that his boss Kidman, the CEO of a tech firm, wants to be dominated.
Kidman has made nothing like it since the dream-like erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut with then-husband Tom Cruise 25 years ago.
She said that an intimacy co-ordinator and closed set had been vital to conjuring the sex scenes which tell the story of her character's existential crisis, resolved through a taboo-busting sexual odyssey.
Kidman said: 'I think this film is obviously yes about sex, but it's about desire it's about your inner thoughts, it's about secrets, it's about marriage, it's about truth, power, consent.
'This is one woman's story and this is I hope a very liberating story. It's told by a woman through her gaze. It's Halina (Reijn's) script, she wrote it and she directs and that made it unique, that suddenly I was going to be in the hands of a woman with this material. It was very dear to our shared instincts and very, very freeing.'
She added: 'I don't think there's a judgement attached (about the character). It's for each person to react to Romy and the way she behaves. My connection to it is that I want to examine human beings, women, on screen, to explore what it means to be human in all the facets of that and the labyrinth of that.'
She said that she was: 'exposed and vulnerable and frightened when it comes to giving it to the world' but that her experience of making it had been: 'delicate and intimate and very deep.'
She said: 'I knew she wasn't going to exploit me. However anyone interprets that, I didn't feel exploited. I felt very much a part of that. There was enormous caretaking by all of us, we were all very gentle with each other and helped each other. It felt very authentic, protected and, at the same time, real.'
The film opens with Kidman's character, Romy Mathis, faking a very convincing orgasm while having sex with her husband, played by Antonio Banderas, and then going into another room and masturbating to pornography.
She explores her desire to be dominated with her intern but – unlike in previous erotic dramas such as Basic Instinct – female desire doesn't destroy her career or her family life and, without giving away the ending, she remains professionally powerful and married at its conclusion.
Director Reijn said: 'I think all beings have different sides within ourselves and we all have a beast within ourselves. For women, we don't have a lot of space yet to explore this behaviour.
I don't believe in good or evil I believe that we are both.' She added that men needed to work on the 'huge orgasm gap.' Actor Dickinson chimed in: 'Everyone deserves a good orgasm.'
He added: 'I think there is a confusion about how to conduct yourself and how to conduct yourself within sex. Halina was always ready to dissect and challenge that and to challenge the nuance of that behaviour that opened up a whole new world for me.'
Nicole cut a glamorous figure as she arrived at the Hotel Excelsior during the 81st Venice International Film Festival on Friday.
The film star looked incredible for the day as she slipped into a black midi dress with a plunging neckline that highlighted her lithe figure.
The garment featured short sleeves and ruffled shoulders while Nicole added height to her frame with a pair of white kitten heels.
Styling her blonde locks into a ponytail, the Oscar winner complimented her outfit with a pair of sunglasses.
Babygirl sees Nicole star as a a high-powered New York business executive who starts a risky affair with her much-younger intern.
The actress recently admitted she's not sure she has the 'bravery' to watch the movie at the Venice Film Festival.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, she said: 'There's something in me going: 'Okay, this was made for the big screen and to be seen with people. I'm not sure I have that much bravery.''
'I've made some films that are pretty exposing, but not like this.'
Nicole added that Babygirl is the most 'exposing' film of her career to date.
The Big Little Lies star told how she feels particularly anxious about people seeing the film's racy sex scenes.
She said: 'It's like, golly, I'm doing this, and it's actually now going to be seen by the world. That's a very weird feeling.'
Nicole shared her apprehension over audiences seeing the sex scenes, admitting that the 'vulnerable' filming process left her feeling 'ragged'.
Babygirl sees Nicole take on the role of Romy, a business executive who is balancing her career with trying to find fulfillment in her marriage to a theatre director (Antonio).
Cracks in their marriage appear when new intern Samuel (Harris) makes his attraction to Romy clear and they begin to explore a 'forbidden sexual dynamic'.
Director Halina Reijn is said to have wanted to put specific focus on the female orgasm in the thriller, with one charged scene showing Romy masturbating.
It is not the first time Nicole has starred in a steamy age-gap romance as she recently took on the leading role in Netflix's A Family Affair alongside Zac Efron.
In the rom-com, the pair starred in one steamy nude scene together, with Nicole giving an insight into the filming process in a recent interview.
She told how she thinks it is 'lazy' to solely rely on chemistry when casting lovers as she weighed in on the topic of audition chemistry tests.
She told The Hollywood Reporter's Drama Actress Roundtable: 'There's a way you can shoot things, I think just relying on chemistry is lazy. There's the writing, there's the interaction - you can literally be directed through it.'
'Also, you can not have chemistry, and onscreen, it's made,' she added.
A Family Affair proved not to be a hit with critics, with claims later emerging that Nicole's husband Keith Urban was 'secretly' pleased about its poor reception.
An insider told New Idea that it didn't sit right with Keith, 56, seeing his wife get cosy with Zac, after the pair last portrayed lovers 12 years ago in the buzzy crime drama The Paperboy.
'He absolutely trusts Nicole but it unnerved him seeing her get so cosy with Zac on-screen a second time around,' the source said.
'She likely won't be doing a third, which, deep down, has made Keith happy to no end — something he's having to keep to himself of course!'
Babygirl review: Nicole Kidman sizzles in this tale of passion and power across the age divide, writes BRIAN VINER
Babygirl
Verdict: A sexy, post #MeToo thriller
One of the oddities of these post #MeToo years in Hollywood is that Lolita-style stories about older men falling for much younger women or even schoolgirls have practically disappeared – while the opposite dynamic is suddenly all the rage.
Hardly a month seems to pass without an older woman bedding a chap 25 years her junior, as if to right a century of cinematic wrongs.
Anyway, hot on the high heels of Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine getting it together in The Idea of You on Amazon Prime, and Nicole Kidman cavorting with Zac Efron in A Family Affair on Netflix, along comes Kidman again, entangled in more ways than one with 28-year-old British actor Harris Dickinson in the steamy psychosexual thriller Babygirl.
Here at the Venice Film Festival, air-conditioned cinemas are currently offering a blessed relief from hotter-than-usual weather. But last night's world premiere of Babygirl brought a different kind of sizzle.
Kidman has described it as the most 'exposing' performance she has ever given – which, considering 1999's Eyes Wide Shut, is quite a claim.
She plays Romy, a corporate hotshot who runs a thriving robotics company replacing warehouse staff with automatons, and making wise observations to her workforce such as 'one-day shipping has dramatically upped the ante'.
On the face of it she is as serenely successful at home as she is at work. Her dishy theatre director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) seems only too delighted to cater to her somewhat vigorous sexual demands, and she to his. The family unit is completed by a couple of teenage daughters – not that Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn spends much time developing them. One of them is gay and the other likes dancing.
Still, Reijn has other matters to attend to, and gets down to them with arresting urgency. Filmmakers sometimes start their features with sound rather than pictures – a hubbub of people chatting, perhaps, or a lone dog barking in the street. Here, it's Romy evidently in the throes of sexual ecstasy, although she needs to look at online porn to finish the job. 'Exposing' indeed.
Later, on her way to work, Romy is struck by the sight of a young man calming a dangerous dog. The young man turns out to be Samuel (Dickinson), one of a new batch of company interns, who are duly ushered in to pay homage to Romy in her swanky office. She instantly clocks his good looks and his swagger, and soon enough she finds that she cannot resist him.
But Babygirl is not just the story of an illicit office affair across the age divide. Far more interestingly, it is about power and workplace politics. Samuel senses that Romy, whose job is telling others what to do, has a kinky yearning to be the one jumping to orders. So the CEO and the intern switch roles; the boss becomes the bossed.
That is far from the end of the affair. There are revelations and recriminations, ambitions thwarted, and hints that Romy's sexual psychoses are somehow connected with a strange childhood spent in cults and communes.
There is also an ending that couldn't possibly happen if this were a relationship between a male head honcho and a woman much lower on the corporate ladder. However, at the same time, I wonder if Heijn is being quite as counterintuitive as she thinks: this is still, for the most part, a story in which the man holds the cards.
Nevertheless, it is a smart, sexy film, brilliantly and boldly acted by Kidman and Dickinson, with first-class support from Banderas (who has spent most of his career being absolutely nobody's idea of a cuckold).
As for the almost-unmentionable, the alleged cosmetic work that sometimes seems to have limited Kidman's range of expressions from A only to about D, that is cleverly woven into the narrative. Romy is clearly the kind of woman who would make a friend of Botox.
On the subject of injections, for the rest of us here in Venice, after some so-so early films, Babygirl has given us just the shot of adrenaline we required.
Babygirl comes out in January
