Nicole Kidman’s Daring Babygirl Scene Was So Real The Director Called Cut
Babygirl is back in the tabloids: Nicole Kidman’s 2024 erotic thriller is now igniting behind-the-scenes gossip over a kinky scene that felt uncomfortably real for director Halina Reijn — mirroring Kidman’s turn as a power player pulled into a perilous attraction.
Nicole Kidman keeps finding new ways to hijack the news cycle, and this time it is her 2024 erotic thriller 'Babygirl' stirring things up again. Not just for the age-gap power trip at the center, but for a bar scene so oddly specific it turns out the director more or less lived it.
The milk scene everyone keeps texting about
In 'Babygirl', Kidman plays Romy, a high-powered exec who slips into a charged, controlling relationship with her much younger intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). The vibe is dom/sub, the boundaries are thin, and then there is the moment: Samuel sends Romy a glass of milk at a bar. She downs it in one go. He drops a 'good girl' on his way out. Cue collective gasp.
That beat did not come out of nowhere. Writer-director Halina Reijn told IndieWire the scene is ripped from a night she had years ago in Belgium. She had just come off a great stage performance, her colleagues went to bed, and she ended up alone at a bar ordering something tame. A young Belgian actor — at least 15 years younger, as she remembers it — sent her a glass of milk. She thought the move was weirdly bold and, yes, hot. So she knocked it back as a kind of reward, immediately felt nauseous, and that was that. No romance. No follow-up. Just a strange little interaction that felt intimate and stuck in her brain until she wrote it into this movie.
Kidman on filming the more intense stuff
Kidman has said the sexual side of 'Babygirl' pushed her further than she expected. The scenes are raw and very much about control and vulnerability, and she says the only way through was total trust between her, Dickinson, and Reijn. At one point, she told The Sun she was so over shooting repeated climaxes that she wanted to tap out entirely:
'There was an enormous amount of sharing and trust and then frustration. It is like, 'Don't touch me.' There were times when we were shooting where I was like, 'I don't want to orgasm anymore.' Don't come near me. I hate doing this. I don't care if I am never touched again in my life! I'm over it. It was so present all the time for me that it was almost like a burnout.'
She also gave Reijn credit for keeping the set safe while they chased that level of intensity. Not exactly a fun day at work, but it is part of why the performance lands the way it does.
What the movie actually is
Beyond the headline moments, 'Babygirl' is a power-play romance that gets thorny fast. Romy is in charge; Samuel is green. The dynamic slides into BDSM and psychological tug-of-war, and the movie is interested in the messy space where desire and control bleed together. Antonio Banderas and Sophie Wilde round out the cast.
- Director: Halina Reijn
- Cast: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde
- Runtime: 1h 54m
- Rotten Tomatoes score: 76%
- Where to watch (US): Streaming on Max (yes, the artist formerly known as HBO Max)