Remembering 'The Paperboy': The Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron team-up that shocked the world

This weekend, Netflix is teaming up Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman for A Family Affair, a cute new rom-com directed by Richard LaGravenese (Living Out Loud). The film is about a young woman named Zara (Joey King) whose boss, a former teen heartthrob actor (Zac Efron), starts sleeping with her mother (Nicole Kidman), much to Zara's horror. And yes, that is a story that could very much be the basis for an erotic thriller, but here it's instead being played for broad slapstick laughs. 

The thing is, Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman already did the erotic thriller thing 12 years ago. And while the internet likes to pretend that everything old never existed, we can never forget. 

How could we, when that movie was writer-director and camp maestro Lee Daniels' The Paperboy, and it involved the Oscar-winning actress of The Hours excitedly urinating all over the beautiful young star of the High School Musical movies while loudly and proudly proclaiming, "If anyone's gonna piss on him, it's going to be me!" 

That's not the sort of thing one easily forgets. 

This is Daniels' specialty — searing outrageousness into our brains with one wildly over-the-top moment after another. Like so many queer filmmakers who came before him, Daniels speaks camp fluently. For his second film, Precious, in 2009, Monique won an Oscar for — among other things — throwing a TV at Gabourey Sidibe. And after The Paperboy came the six seasons of his hip-hop extravaganza Empire, which… well, the moments of outrageousness there are far, far, far too many to count. (Bless you, Taraji P. Henson.)

Still, nothing Daniels has made brought out the knives of the critics quite like The Paperboy did. Loathed by the press and audiences alike in 2012, this movie was a great big bomb on basically every front. But the world was wrong! And we're here to reclaim this explosion of bonkers queer camp as iconic entertainment worthy of nothing but our most profound love and affection.

Who is The Paperboy?

Taking on his first "adult" role post Disney musicals, Zac Efron plays Jack, a college dropout who's returned home with his hot tail between his legs, quite lost as to what he'll do next. But despite a dreaminess that Efron makes indistinguishable from slack-jawed dullness, Jack seems content just lounging around his parents' house in his tighty-whities (a sight Daniels spends no shortage of film stock lingering upon) while occasionally delivering the local newspaper for some cash.

That is, until his older brother Ward (Matthew McConaughey) also sweeps back into their swampy Florida hometown, but for business, not pleasure. Ward is a muckraking newsman sniffing around the case of a corrupt local sheriff who got murdered. A gator-wrestling redneck named Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack, giving what can only be described as a truly grotesque performance) is sitting on death row for the crime. But Ward thinks Hillary might be innocent. Or at least railroaded via insufficient evidence. And he got these ideas via pleading correspondences sent to him by Hillary's long-distance beloved, an Alabamian hot house who goes by the name of Charlotte Bless (Kidman). 

There's big, and then there's "Nicole Kidman in The Paperboy" big.

In a career full of bold moves, Charlotte Bless just might be Kidman's boldest. As if imported straight from the nearest John Waters joint, Charlotte is a capital-F floozy. Hair bleached to a blonde crisp ("Straight hair gives me class," she opines) and spilling out of her skin-tight dresses, Kidman plays the role to the parking lot beyond the back row of the bleachers. Her Charlotte is a vulgar, broken, black hole of braying narcissism and want. She's a toxic spill of sex and dissolution. And yet she's also kind of sweet at the same time? 

Naturally, the second Jack sees her, he is fully and completely lost under her spell. And so are we. And so is every single character on-screen. Well, Ward might not take much notice since he's a closested homosexual with his own reams of damage. But every other man who gets sucked into Charlotte's off-axis orbit seems to be immediately struck dopey-eyed inarticulate by her. 

Heck, Hillary didn't even have to meet her in the flesh — theirs has, up to this moment, been a romance conducted entirely via letter. Until the film's big central showcase of salacious spectacle, that is, where Kidman and Cusack bark sex sounds back and forth at one another from across the prison's meeting room, as everyone else (including us in the audience) watches on in disbelief and horror. 

If there's been a more bizarre and perverse sex scene committed to film in the 12 years since this one, I'm not sure I could name it. And is that not something worth exclaiming from the mountaintops? Now that's entertainment!

The Paperboy was a bomb as big as Zac Efron's glutes.

But most people who saw The Paperboy in 2012 didn't see the glory in all this. When the film premiered at Cannes, it was excoriated by critics (IndieWire dubbed it "a disastrous flop" right out of the gate). When the film got released in theaters that fall, it couldn't even crack $4 million (on a $12 million budget) worldwide.

The one exception to the air of ire was Kidman, who got sound praise for her "bravery." In nearly every interview she gave at the time, she was asked why the hell she took this role. She kept coming back to the same word — "raw." She liked the role's rawness. And Charlotte is certainly that. If eyeballs can feel chafed from watching a movie, The Paperboy accomplishes it. And for her raw, brave work, Kidman ultimately got nominated for both a SAG award and a Golden Globe. The world seemed to clock that Kidman understood the task at hand, even if nobody else, in their eyes, did. 

Long before the AMC ads, Kidman had an eye on queer sensibilities and camp. The list of queer filmmakers Kidman has worked with over the years is very long. 

By the time The Paperboy had mainstream audiences' jaws dropped, we'd already seen Kidman go ultra with the sultry showgirl in Moulin Rouge!, the ball-busting suburbanite in The Stepford Wives, and the dream-analyzing damsel-in-distress in Batman Forever. But the role that convinced most of us she was a genuine talent to be reckoned with in the first place was that of wannabe femme fatale newswoman Suzanne Stone in Gus Van Sant's To Die For. (It must be said that if you can find any echo of Charlotte among Kidman's other roles, it's very much there in stupid, manipulative Suzanne.) 

The Paperboy embraces outlandishness, top to bottom. 

Still, to chalk this film up to just Kidman knowing what was going on and making the best of it seems, to put it mildly, a discredit to the Black gay man at the center of its making. Lee Daniels' outré work has been steeped in audacious ingenuity every step of the way. Camp is the language, the essence, of his filmmaking. It's the engine driving (one might even say pummeling away at) everything. 

Like a Tennessee Williams play mixed up with vermouth and methamphetamines, The Straights are not OK in Lee Daniels' world. The sloppily rouged divas and gator-wrestling dudes of The Paperboy are spinning and bucking wildly out of control, and dammit, it's funny. It's scathing. It's a glorious mess, sticky to the touch. If you walked out of this movie not desiring a shower, then Daniels wouldn't have done his job. 

Nowadays, once-controversial queer filmmakers like John Waters and Todd Haynes get their films — which work at this exact same over-the-top register — put into the Criterion Collection. They are feted with major exhibits at the Academy Museum. Why Daniels' work — and specifically, the aria of sleaze-ploitation that he summons with The Paperboy — hasn't been afforded that same celebratory lens, one can only conjecture. 

Because how can you watch the ex-Mrs. Tom Cruise squat over Mr. High School Musical and not consider it every bit as hilariously punk about smashing up the heteronormative mainstream as it was for Mink Stole to stick a rosary up Divine's ass in Multiple Maniacs back in the day? It seems fairly clear to me that this was Daniels' intention. That scene, and the many examples surrounding it, didn't just slip in there by mistake. Lee Daniels did that!

With all its swampy outlandishness, The Paperboy represented a huge swing by Daniels to wield melodrama and camp with purpose, spinning it in invigorating and wild new directions. And with a cast of great big top-shelf movie stars no less. We've managed to come around on other misunderstood satires, like John McNaughton's sleazy threesome thriller Wild Things and Paul Verhoeven's alien-squashing epic Starship Troopers — even Verhoeven's Showgirls, the topless pinnacle of modern camp. The movies proudly speak in the vernacular of excess. 

So now, with its two central stars reunited for this week's cute little Netflix rom-com, it ought to be The Paperboy's turn to shine. It has more than earned its spot in the pantheon of legendary camp. Make like Kidman and Efron did once upon that time, and tune your frequency straight into this spectacle of overheated lust and betrayal and the hottest of pink hot pants. The Paperboy will piss on your leg and tell you it's raining, and you should love every mad minute of it.

How to watch: The Paperboy is now streaming on Prime Video.