There’s no shame in her game.
The writer-director of Nicole Kidman’s film, “Babygirl,” is weighing in on the age gap of the stars in the newly released erotic thriller.
Halina Reijn sat down with W Magazine in an interview published on Wednesday and addressed “Babygirl” being a part of the recent trend in movies featuring May-December romances. Kidman is 57, and her lover in the flick, Harris Dickinson, is 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,” Reijn, 49, said. “It should completely be normalized that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships.”
“We’re not trapped in a box anymore,” the writer added. “We internalize the male gaze, we internalize patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.”
“Babygirl” follows Kidman’s character Romy — who is a married tech company CEO — as she engages in a risky affair with an intern at her company named Samuel (played by Dickinson).
Reijn revealed that she made “Babygirl” as a response to the erotic films, which rose to popularity in the 1990s. She told the outlet 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,” she added.
“I found so much fun in the fact that America to me has a kind of suppressed relationship towards sex, and I do too,” Reijn told Interview Magazine on Thursday. “I really relate to it. So America serves as a metaphor of my own struggles with this theme.”
Earlier in December, Kidman spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how “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” in “Babygirl.”
“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,’” she continued. “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.”
