Realistic sex scenes are one of Nicole Kidman’s fortes.
The raunchy shots she filmed for 1999’s “Eyes Wide Shut” are said to have been a catalyst to the end of her marriage to Tom Cruise.
2012’s erotically charged “The Paperboy” featured a disturbing scene where she peed on Zac Efron’s character to save him from jellyfish stings. Her eye-popping rough sex scenes in Big Little Lies became one of the series’ most talked about points.
Now she leads “Babygirl” – a film which opens with her having a dramatic orgasm and continues with a series of sex scenes which make “Fifty Shades of Gray” or “9 1/2 Weeks” look decidedly tame.
“I think it’s very releasing, this film. I hope it is. I’ve had some people say it’s the most disturbing film they’ve ever seen, which I’m like, ‘Oh no, I’m so sorry’ … A lot of it is about power and what that does to you sexually,” Kidman told The Hollywood Reporter.
“Babygirl” doesn’t conform to the standard male-oriented format of most raunchy thrillers. The lustful protagonist is Kidman’s character Romy, an older and powerful CEO who isn’t satisfied in her marriage to Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas, and turns to her much younger office intern Samuel, played by Harrison Dickinson, for sexual satisfaction.
Kidman, 57, is proud of the female perspective in the movie, written and directed by Halina Reijn, especially because her role wasn’t written for someone in their 20s or 30s, and that she was “turned on” and “sort of hypnotized” by the script the first time she read it.
As Reijn has described it: “All beings have a beast living inside. For women, we have not gotten a lot of space yet to explore this behavior.”
Asked about her prominent orgasms (of course, all faked for the camera), Kidman admitted: “I blush, still … I’m very interested in exploring those things, but I’m not that extroverted. I was so in character. To pull the curtain back on all of it, it’s too sacred.”
Thankfully, her current husband, country singer Keith Urban, is good at separating his wife and her work.
“My husband is an artist, so he understands all of it,” she recently told people, insisting he stays out of the creative process altogether until the final product.
“He sees the show when it’s a show, all edited together … He doesn’t read any script, he really doesn’t know what’s going on, on set,” Kidman added to the magazine.
The situation stands in stark contrast to 1999 when Kidman and Cruise – then two of the biggest movie stars on the planet – signed up as husband and wife to star in notoriously demanding director Stanley Kubrick’s movie “Eyes Wide Shut” together.
The erotically charged thriller follows a doctor character played by Cruise, whose wife admits to fantasizing about other men, setting him off on a journey of sexual and psychological discovery.
Some of Kidman’s sex scenes were with actor Gary Goba, who played a naval officer in the film. Cruise was not on the closed set when they were filmed, according to Kidman’s biographer, James L. Dickerson.
He tracked down Goba for his 2018 book “Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life” and told The Post
he was astonished at how raw Goba said the sex scenes were, with the pair acting out roughly 50 sexual positions over six days of filming.
Goba was stunned on the first day when Kubrick told them both to strip completely naked.
“Goba was shocked at the specificity Kubrick used to direct his movements,” Dickerson writes in the book. “The director spoke to him as if Nicole were not even in the room. If Nicole heard directions that she did not like, she chastised Kubrick for suggesting them, but she never said no to anything that he suggested, no matter how explicit.”
Based on what Goba and others told him, Dickerson said he believes those sex scenes changed the dynamics of Kidman and Cruise’s marriage forever.
“It was key to their divorce,” Dickerson claimed to The Post.
Kidman admitted at the time she had pushed herself with the filming, but did so for Kubrick.
“I don’t think I would do what I did for any other director,” she said in 1999, adding: “Stanley wanted it to be almost pornographic, but he did not exploit me.”
Echoing the attitude she still applies to sex scenes, she told Salon magazine: “I did it because I thought it was important for the film. The film deals with sex and sexual obsession, and the scenes could not have been of me in a bra and panties pretending to have sex with somebody.
“It had to have a graphic quality to it. It was difficult going home to my husband after those scenes, but we both decided we were basically going to get lost in this world for a year and a half, and that’s what we did.”
Cruise went on to file for divorce from Kidman in 2001, citing “irreconcilable differences.” Neither have ever revealed the true reasons behind the end of their marriage – during which they adopted Bella, now 31, and Connor, now 29 – but Kidman told Vanity Fair in 2002 she was so bereft, the divorce left her “crying in the fetal position on the floor” at one point.
In 2012 Kidman went on to tell The Hollywood Reporter: “People thought that making [“Eyes Wide Shut”] was the beginning of the end of my marriage, but I don’t really think it was.”
Her raunchy on-screen exploits date back a decade before even that movie, with the 1989 thriller, “Dead Calm,” which first brought her to the attention of Hollywood.
In that movie, she has an intense sex scene with Billy Zane and an assistant director on the show said he was struck by how she slipped in and out of character on set.
“There was a lot of violence in the film directed at her,” Dickerson explained. “The assistant director said that what amazed him was he had brought his young children to the set and right after a very violent scene she sat down, totally changed her demeanor and played with his kids.
“Then she’d get up and go right back into this terrifying scene without so much as blinking an eye.”
Of course not everything Kidman – who is also mother to Sunday Rose, 16, and Faith Margaret, 13, with Urban – appears in is sexually charged. In fact, “Babygirl” is only the last movie in a year of marquee roles for Kidman.
She also starred as a glamorous and successful novelist matriarch in Netflix’ whodunit series “The Perfect Couple” and as a high-ranking CIA agent in action series “Special Ops: Lioness” and lent her voice to adventure animation “Spellbound”.
She’s also been able to showcase the lighter side of the older-woman-seducing-a-younger-man theme, in romcom “A Family Affair.” where her character seduces Zac Efron (now, somehow, 37) and yes, it features yet more steamy scenes.
In fact, even Kidman jokingly admitted that performing all the sex in “Babygirl” left her completely exhausted. “There were times when we were shooting where I was like, ‘I don’t want to orgasm anymore,’” Kidman quipped.
‘Babygirl’ is released on Dec. 25.
