Age is just a number for Nicole Kidman’s “Babygirl” director, Halina Reijn.
During an interview for the erotic thriller, the director defended the age gap between her two lead actors, Kidman, 57, and Harris Dickinson, 28.
“If we see a movie where the male actor is the same age as the female actor, we find that odd. Which is insane. It should completely be normalized that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships,” Reijn, 49, told W Magazine.
NICOLE KIDMAN, 57, SAYS IT’S EMPOWERING TO BE SEEN AS ‘SEXUAL BEING’ IN EROTIC THRILLER
“We’re not trapped in a box anymore. We internalize the male gaze, we internalize patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.”
The Academy Award-winning actress portrayed a powerful CEO and mom Romy, who partook in an affair with her younger intern, Samuel (Dickinson), in the movie.
The Dutch director, who also worked on 2022’s “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” continued to describe that she wanted the sex scenes to “feel incredibly hot and steamy and fun, but I also wanted them to be real.”
“Sexuality is stop-and-go. It’s never like a glamour scene from a Hollywood movie in the ’90s. That’s just not how it works,” Reijn said.
Kidman previously opened up about her new “raw and dangerous” role in the film and explained why it’s empowering to be viewed as a “sexual being” in her late 50s.
“A lot of times, women are discarded at a certain period of their career as a sexual being. So, it was really beautiful to be seen in this way,” the Australian native told The Hollywood Reporter in part.
NICOLE KIDMAN SAYS EROTIC THRILLER ‘BABYGIRL’ WAS ‘LIBERATING’ BUT LEFT HER FEELING ‘VERY EXPOSED’
“From the minute I read it, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a voice I haven’t seen, this is a place that I haven’t been, I don’t think audiences have been.’ My character has reached a stage where she’s got all this power, but she’s not sure who she is, what she wants, what she desires, even though she seems to have it all. And I think that’s really relatable.”
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This wasn’t the first time Kidman worked on a movie where an older woman was interested in a younger man. This year, the actress additionally starred in Netflix’s “A Family Affair,” with Zac Efron, 37, as her love interest.
Kidman undoubtedly had a busy year with six 2024 projects, including starring in Netflix’s “The Perfect Couple,” the Paramount+ series “Lioness” and more.
Fox News Digital’s Christina Dugan Ramirez contributed to this report.
