Babygirl: Halina Reijn and Harris Dickinson on exploring kink and sexuality in Nicole Kidman film

If you’ve spent anytime online this past month, you will have seen the footage of Nicole Kidman, decked out in a velvet vintage Jean Paul Gaultier gown and chugging a glass of milk on stage at the National Board of Review gala.

She dedicated the act to “all the baby girls in the room”. What’s a baby girl and what does it have to do with milk?

Babygirl is Kidman’s latest film, for which she won the top acting award at the Venice Film Festival, and milk, well, milk is a symbol of childhood and purity.

Babygirl is not pure, and it is definitely not kid-friendly. The sexual thriller-comedy features Kidman as Romy, a corporate high-flyer with an unsatisfying sex life. Then she meets intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who awakens her desires and allows her to access a part of herself she has repressed.

It’s a power-play with aspects of BDSM and one of the things he commands her to do, is to drink a glass of milk at a bar. Perhaps it’s the juxtaposition of milk and sexuality that has made that moment a viral sensation, leading Vulture to, tongue-in-cheek, call milk the pervert’s beverage of choice.

It also wasn’t something that Babygirl writer and director Halina Reijn conjured out of nowhere. It actually happened to her.

Reijn, who is also an actor, was in a production of Hedda Gabler at a Belgium theatre some years ago.

After one performance, she was still pumping with adrenaline, but her colleagues were tired and begged off. So, she went to a bar by herself and, there, sat at the other end was a young Belgian actor, “very famous, way younger than me, that I knew of but had never met,” Reijn told The Nightly.

“He ordered me a glass of milk and I literally thought, ‘Where do you get the courage? How do you dare do that?’. Then I liked so much that he did it, that I drank the whole thing as a challenge back to provoke him.”

In real life, nothing happened. Reijn felt nauseated from the dairy and the young actor left. He didn’t say to her, “Good girl” as Samuel does to Romy.

Reijn did end up working with him down the line and even called him to ask him if he was OK if she wrote the encounter into the film she was working on because it struck her as an intimate thing. She even asked him why he did it, “He just said, ‘I thought it would be a fun thing to do”.

That the milk scene has become the defining moment of Babygirl gives Reijn great pleasure.

There are clips of milk play all over the internet – people ordering it, drinking it, spilling it, putting it in wine glasses and forcing others to drink it.

It’s not the most traditionally erotic act in the film but it is the most charged.

“It’s a sexual movie, so people should talk about the sex, but if you look closely, there’s not a lot of actual sex acts in it but it’s still shocking.

“This milk scene, to me, is incredibly sexual and they’re not even touching. That is one of the sexiest scenes in the film because female sexuality is a lot about story and suggestion.

“Of course, the real sex act can feel good, but we need a lot around it for us to get aroused and for us to be into it. That is what I wanted to show with my movie, how the female brain wiring works.”

Reijn grew up in the Netherlands watching sexual thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s from the likes of Paul Verhoeven and Adrian Lyne, and they were seductive, entertaining and mainstream. They let her feel her own sexual fantasies were OK, and “to see darkness in that context healed me as a person”.

But they almost always went the same way.

“I hated the endings of all of them. Somebody was killed, the woman was punished, and it was incredibly sexist. Fatal Attraction is the best example,” she said.

She wanted to make those types of films but take them somewhere else, to show that you could have a woman who was strong and weak, vulnerable and confused about her place in the world, who lies and makes mistakes, and to never deny her humanity, because that is what women are.

Reijn chose BDSM as Romy’s kink because it represented “what it is to be female, especially in a patriarchy”.

“A lot of what has defined us in the past is about control and being controlled by others. I thought BDSM would be an amazing kink to give to a character in this comedy of manners about power, control, surrender, consent and sexuality.

“As women, how can we become our authentic selves instead of pleasing everybody around us, constantly looking at ourselves through the lens of ‘I want to be the perfect mother, I want to be the perfect daughter, I want to be the perfect leader, I want to be the perfect lover, I want to have the perfect vagina, the perfect face’.

“With this kind, she can actually be in touch with her beast and become a little bit closer to her authentic self.”

With Kidman, Reijn found a collaborator who brought no judgments and a lot of openness. The filmmaker said she would normally coax others out of their shell by being radically honest and vulnerable herself, but she didn’t have to do that with Kidman.

Kidman saw Reijn’s 2019 film Instinct and wanted to talk to her about it. “I almost fainted when I heard that,” Reijn recalled. “I’m this girl in the Netherlands and she was my icon.

“From that first call, I never had to be embarrassed with her because I could feel, immediately, by how she spoke to me that I could be completely free.”

They became fast friends, which is what happens when you open to one another about darkness, destruction and rebirth, death, sex and the one topic everyone avoids, shame.

Central to Romy’s sexual exploration is to interrogate this shame she feels about her desires. Shame is a difficult and sticky thing to talk about but it’s even harder to capture someone’s interiority of it.

In that, Kidman’s performance was unvarnished and without ego.

Reijn wasn’t the only Kidman cheerleader on set. Dickinson, one of the most exciting young actors today, who has had a blazing few years with roles in Triangle of Sadness, Scrapper, The Iron Claw and See How They Run, was initially intimidated by the prospect of his scene partner.

“I was nervous. I mean, I’m always nervous, but particularly with someone like Nicole, who I’ve admired for years, there’s always trepidation and fear around it,” he told The Nightly. “But she put me at ease straight away.

The two met months before shooting and had a couple of weeks of rehearsals but they left space to make discoveries on the day.

“We really took the time to get it right, but she’s so playful, Nicole, and as is Halina. Everything becomes a real exploration, we were leaving no stone unturned in that sense,” Dickinson said.

“(With Halina), you’re in safe hands, and there’s care and there’s love. She brings compassion to her work as a director, and empathy, because without that, it is really hard to relax as an actor.

“For me, acting is all about the ability to be comfortable in front of people that you don’t really know very well when you have to do quite vulnerable stuff, and perform and dance and whatnot, and Halina gives you a good set of parameters.”

To go toe-to-toe with Kidman in scenes that called for intimacy and a power dynamic that was rarely clear-cut is already difficult, even more so when you’re playing a character who is a cipher.

The audience knows little about Dickinson’s Samuel. He blows into Romy’s life with no backstory and little context. He’s also unreliable about his own story, and that becomes his story.

“Why is he telling those lies? What is the real situation? We fleshed it out, we understood it but we chose to not fully realise certain things because it was almost more interesting to not have answers. It was almost more exciting for us to have ambiguity.”

Dickinson and co-star Antonio Banderas could have played characters who embody traditional notions of masculinity – they definitely have the physicality for it – but Reijn was more interested in having male supporting characters who didn’t fit the mould.

They too are confused, and “what is allowed, what is not allowed, who are they supposed to be,” she said.

But women, Reijn said, and any minority “that are not straight, white men” find it hard to find space to be themselves.

Babygirl is the movie Reijn would’ve wanted to watch when she only had the likes of Indecent Proposal, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct.

Dickinson added, “I think that audiences deserve more than your archetypical sexual thriller, and they deserve more than just seeing a sex scene in a very standard, sort of romanticised, explicit way.

“There’s been enough of that and now this is an interesting film to usher in a new era for that kind of cinema.”

Babygirl is in cinemas on January 30