Babygirl writer-director Halina Reijn is sharing her perspective on depicting an age-gap romance in Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson‘s new erotic thriller.
During a recent interview with W Magazine, the filmmaker was asked about Babygirl, which is currently playing in theaters, joining the list of recent films that feature age-gap romantic relationships, such as May-December and The Idea of You.
“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 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. We internalize the male gaze, we internalize patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.”
Babygirl follows Kidman’s Romy, a high-powered CEO, who puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern, Dickinson’s Samuel. Reijn also told W that she wanted the film’s sex scenes “to feel incredibly hot and steamy and fun, but I also wanted them to be real.”
“Sexuality is stop-and-go,” she added. “It’s never like a glamour scene from a Hollywood movie in the ’90s. That’s just not how it works.”
Earlier this month, Kidman opened up in a cover story for The Hollywood Reporter about why she felt called to her role in Babygirl.
“A lot of times women are discarded at a certain period of their career as a sexual being,” the actress explained. “So it was really beautiful to be seen in this way. 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.” 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.”
