Nicole Kidman describes Babygirl's sex scenes as among the most vulnerable of her career

Nicole Kidman was always going to have either a strong opinion on the discourse machine's obsession with sex scenes, or decide not to engage with it at all. Intentionally or not, she's chosen the latter. "What did you say?" the actor—who, in her own words, largely explores themes in her movies "through the lens of sexuality"—responded when Vanity Fair asked her about the ongoing controversy. "I’m not familiar with many things,” she eventually answered. “I just work with abandonment."

But despite her familiarity with and success in the medium, the sex scenes in director Halina Reijn's upcoming Babygirl still pushed Kidman to her limit. "I never came out of it, really," the actor said of filming with The Iron Claw's Harris Dickinson, for the kinky film about a high-powered New York exec (Kidman) who strikes up an affair with her new, younger intern. "I’ve made some films that are pretty exposing, but not like this… It left me ragged. At some point I was like, I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to do this anymore, but at the same time I was compelled to do it," she continued. "Halina would hold me and I would hold her, because it was just very confronting to me… 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. This is something you do and hide in your home videos."

Reijn, who also directed the 2022 Gen Z satire Bodies Bodies Bodies, calls her new film an "X-ray" of kink. "We don’t show this glossy fantasy; it’s actually an attempt to show the human side of all of that," she told VF. But while Kidman and Dickinson worked extensively with intimacy coordinators, Kidman says she still "felt very exposed as an actor, as a woman, as a human being… I had to go in and go out like, I need to put my protection back on. What have I just done? Where did I go? What did I do?"

Luckily, she had an unprecedented creative partner in Reijn. "It was being able to talk unbelievably honestly and graphically—and that’s woman-to-woman, as though you are sitting on your bed and talking to your sister or your best friend," Kidman said. "That’s incredibly safe. Halina has a very strong maternal instinct, so she was very protective of all of us. But particularly me." Besides, Kidman was more than up to the challenge. "That’s vulnerable, but I’m never going to shy away from that to my dying day," she said. "I’ll place myself in a vulnerable position, and see where that takes me." The world will get their first look at the film, which Reijn deems "really hot," when it premieres this Friday at the Venice Film Festival.