The Secret to Harris Dickinson’s Seductive ‘Babygirl’ Performance? Pretending He Didn’t Know Anything About Co-Star Nicole Kidman

When Harris Dickinson first appears in Halina Reijn’s sexy, slippery “Babygirl,” he’s got a dog treat in his hand and a nervous twinkle in his eye. As he charms an angry pup, a terrified and slightly thrilled Nicole Kidman watches just down the street, now safe from the snapping maw of the previously out-of-control canine. The implication is clear: here is someone who can soothe even the wildest of creatures. Perhaps that can extend to Kidman’s Romy?

She — and the audience — find out the answer soon enough. In Reijn’s erotic thriller, Romy’s tightly controlled existence as both a high-powered CEO and a loving wife and mother is thrown into complete disarray by the arrival of alluring intern Samuel (Dickinson). As the pair embark on a kinky, sex-positive BDSM relationship, both of them open themselves to just about everything: pleasure, pain, ruin, George Michael dance parties, conference room-set seductions, heart-stopping realizations, lots of orgasms, and ultimately something like self-actualization.

For rising star Dickinson, slipping into Samuel’s knotty (and naughty) persona was the sort of scary prospect he’s always sought out, even if it did require him to do something a little crazy to soothe his nerves: ignore the Nicole Kidman of it all. Well, try to.

Dickinson first met Kidman a few months before the film went into production in December 2023. As he recounted the story to IndieWire during morning coffee in New York City’s NoMad neighborhood — funnily enough, just a couple of blocks away from distributor A24’s offices — he laughed a bit, knowing how the setup was going to sound. “I actually met her at the Met Gala,” he said. “I went over to her, and I was like, ‘Hello, I’m Harris, we’re going to be doing “Babygirl” together.’ And she looked at me for maybe four seconds, which felt like an eternity, and she said, ‘Oh, Harris, of course.’ And then she gave me a hug.”

Dickinson remains in awe of Kidman, even now, both as a person and a performer. “She is the definition of iconic, isn’t she?” Dickinson said of his co-star. “Beyond her obvious physical advantages as a human, she is just incredibly fascinating to watch. You watch her in ‘Moulin Rouge!,’ ‘Dogville,’ ‘Birth,’ and there’s somehow a door that she opens to her soul and emotions that so many people can’t. You feel that when you’re working with her as well. She’s risky, she’s brave with what she does, she tries stuff. She’s not afraid to put it out there and see how it feels and feel it out.”

So, yes, Dickinson was nervous about not just starring opposite Kidman but doing all of the things (ahem) that his Samuel does to her character Romy. To overcome those jitters, Dickinson said, he tried to slip into a very Samuel-esque frame of mind.

‘Babygirl’Courtesy Everett Collection

“I did have to suppress my nerves,” he said. “I think the best way for me to navigate the film with her, as Samuel, was [to] pretend that I didn’t know anything about her, like I’d never seen her in films. I didn’t want to ask her about anything. I needed to approach this like she was just some random boss to me, because otherwise, I don’t think I would’ve been able to do such … I mean, he’s quite rude to her at times. He says quite daring things to her!”

Yes, the first time Romy sees Samuel, he’s calming down that random dog. But the first time he sees her? Really sees her? He’s being a bit of a jerk to the woman who runs the very company he’s just been employed, and he does it inside the sanctum of her sleek office, in front of a pack of fellow interns and her dedicated second-in-command Esme (Sophie Wilde). He’s ballsy, but Dickinson could only hold that for so long, at least when the cameras stopped rolling.

“He’s constantly poking her and being quite brazen to her,” he said. “So, I was like, ‘The only way I can do this is if I just really ignore the Nicole Kidman of it all to get myself through it.’ Toward the end of the job, I would, slowly, slowly start to be like, ‘How was Kubrick? How was von Trier?’”

Dickinson’s nerves kicked in even before he met Kidman. They started with Reijn’s script. The actor’s doozy of a 2022 production schedule — “A Murder at the End of the World” into “The Iron Claw” and then on to “Blitz” — had been put on pause by the strikes, and there was some time to consider what he really wanted to pursue next. Mostly, he wanted to be scared.

“All I know is that I think, ‘OK, what have I just done? How can I do something next that is a little different?’” the actor said when it comes to choosing his roles. “All I seek out is something that I’ve not done, or something that’s going to push me and challenge me in a way. And then ‘Babygirl’ came along, and I was slightly scared of it, because I didn’t know how I was going to do it. That’s always interesting, because then you’re confronted with your own insecurities and your own inability to understand something, so you then get excited by that. I guess that’s what I’m looking for: an excitement, a bit of fear.”

Reijn offered a space in which Dickinson said he felt comfortable doing the scary thing, of really surrendering to the process and the story. “Ultimately, I just want to be in good cinematic hands in a world where I can step into it and trust it,” he said. “I loved Halina’s work, so it was easy for me to be able to say ‘OK, I surrender.’ That’s all we want, is to be able to surrender to the filmmaker. At least, I do. Not only is she radically honest with her work, but she’s in her own life as well. When I can get on a level with someone and be open like that, it makes it so much easier. But I am very open, I’m very vulnerable, I’m not scared to be vulnerable. My family were very open and encouraged emotional discussion, so I feel I’ve got a good access to that. And I’m just aware that if you shield it and don’t find that access, then your work is going to be fake. That obviously [is going to be] vulnerable because you have to try and expose yourself in the process.”

Dickinson caught himself, paused, and laughed a bit. “Jesus, listen to me. What the fuck am I talking about?”

In some ways, he’s talking about the kind of things he’s always been talking about, at least as it applies to his work. Before Dickinson’s first film role, in Eliza Hittman’s 2017 Sundance stunner “Beach Rats,” we sat across from each other in another room, drinking different caffeinated drinks, talking about his approach to work. At the time, it seemed clear the actor was destined for big things. It also seemed clear he was open to all sorts of experiences (like “Babygirl,” Hittman’s film required Dickinson to shot a number of sex scenes).

Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in ‘Babygirl’A24

Almost a decade later, Dickinson still gets a bit dazed reflecting on that time in his life. “I don’t think I understood what I was in for, even with Sundance, I knew a little bit about the history and Redford and all that,” Dickinson said. “And then I remember getting a call that I got nominated for a Gotham Award, and I was on the train, and I was like, ‘Oh, cool.’ And my team were like, ‘No, no, no, this is a very big deal.’ You don’t understand it until you’re out of it, really.”

How did he picture what things might be like, almost eight years later? “I obviously had big ambitions, but I didn’t have grand expectations,” he said. “I had a lot of ambition. As soon as I did ‘Beach Rats’ and as soon as I was amongst all of those films at Sundance, I realized, Jesus, I need to be in this world of cinema.”

He seems to stay immersed in those worlds, long after shooting has ended. We don’t learn a lot about Samuel throughout Reijn’s film — he really does seem to just show up one day, and whatever scant details he offers Romy often feel fake, little lies, not true but also not really necessary. How do you build a character from that? He remembers perfectly.

“There was a certain amount of unreliable information about Samuel, and even unreliable dialogue that is in the script that I enjoyed and I leaned into, to not be too specific with what the parameters of him were,” Dickinson said. “I knew that he was living in a very cheap area of New York, trying to make ends meet. I knew that he was working two jobs. I knew that he had a directness to him, that was clear to me. The story of his family was murky. He talks about his father in a way that has a lot of, let’s say, embellishment to it. I found that to be rather exciting for me, to not have too many specificities of him and his journey.”

One thing that also helped: the sense that Samuel could exist totally in Romy’s imagination. Dickinson played him “very much in the real world,” but that extra layer of playfulness, of teasing, appealed. “Halina and I spoke about it, there is a world in which he could be a total figment and not of the real world,” she said. “If we’re looking at it from a fairy tale perspective, then there’s a world in which he could have existed only to help Romy’s journey.”

And while Reijn’s film ends with a tidy conclusion for Romy, what happens to Samuel remains much more open-ended. “He appears and then he disappears. That was the idea with him. There was no point in trying to finish his story, because it ultimately wasn’t about him; it was about them and Romy,” he said. “I think he’s still unresolved. He still didn’t get to the bottom of what his thing is. This is something he’s probably going to have to navigate for the rest of his life until someone helps him understand himself a bit more. Or he’s 50, and he buys a motorcycle thinking he can fulfill something, and it doesn’t work. Or the tables are turned.”

Those tables, I’m guessing, would be of the sexy variety, with Samuel becoming a Romy to someone else. When I mention the apparent prudishness of the younger generations these days, Gen Z-ers and Zoomers who are quite forthright with their dislike of onscreen depictions of sex and romance, Dickinson nods and adds, “It’s so true.”

What, then, does he make of some of those same potential audience members going, as they might say, feral for hot sequences involving him and Kidman? Recently, his co-star discussed the potential for some out-of-hands memes and the like to hit the web, the kind that might even make her “terribly upset.”

‘Babygirl’A24

“Yeah, a GIF or a meme,” he said. “How does one prepare for that, other than not look at it or just laugh at it? It’s all so silly and humorous. I’m one that can self-deprecate. I like to be taken the piss out of, maybe until it’s offensive. People are going to take things and run with them and be narrow-minded or whatever or take something out of context. I think it’s just accepting that everything beyond this is out of my control. I try not to be a control freak about that stuff. Maybe that’s why I want to control so much in my own head or my own self.”

Mostly, he’d like the potential meme-maker and GIF-grabbers to consider the content of the film itself. “It’s not exploitative and it’s so tasteful. There’s no actual explicit nudity, really,” he said. “Nicole has more than me. I don’t think Halina was interested in the fanaticism of sex scenes in film or the romanticism of it. She talks about it. The hottest thing [for her] is the [scene with the] milk.” The scene in question sees Samuel ordering Romy a glass of milk during a company-wide happy hour, which she dutifully drinks, acquiescing to a demand both sexy and strange.

As Reijn told me last week during a post-screening Q&A for the WGA, that incident was pulled from a real-life experience she had years ago. That’s the sort of radical honesty Reijn goes for, the kind of real-world vulnerability Dickinson naturally vibes to.

Some of Dickinson’s best work, at least by my estimation, has been with female directors willing to go the extra mile for that veracity, that openness. Dickinson works with female filmmakers at a high clip: Reijn, Hittman, Joanna Hogg, Charlotte Regan, Olivia Newman, Jennifer Yuh Nelson, the list is stacked for an actor with less than 20 film credits.

“I don’t know,” Dickinson said when asked if this was intentional or incidental. “I mean, I think that it’s somewhat been a mixture of both, and the people that I’ve connected with and stories they’re telling that I’ve connected with. I was raised predominantly by a single mom. I get along very well with women, I always have… I always found there’s a tenderness and an emotional intelligence [with women] that a lot of men often don’t come at things with.”

He added, “I don’t want to shit on men. I’ve worked with some lovely men as well that have that emotional intelligence. But I think that sometimes egos get in the way with men.” He pointed to his “Iron Claw” filmmaker Sean Durkin as an example of a “super sensitive, lovely, emotionally capable man,” someone part of “the same ilk” as filmmakers like Reijn, Hittman, and Regan.

We end up circling back to the topics of emotional intelligence, tenderness, and vulnerability. (We agreed that even his role in Ruben Östlund’s raucous class comedy “Triangle of Sadness” leans on male vulnerability. “It’s pretty vulnerable. Very vulnerable. Probably too vulnerable!” he said with a laugh). Maybe that’s the key to his choices?

“If it’s not there, then what are you doing? I mean, how can you not tap into that?” he said. “I’m such an emotional person. Maybe it’s just been with the directors I’ve worked with and the roles I’ve been given. But it feels like it’s got to be there, always, in my mind.”

A24 will release “Babygirl” in theaters on Wednesday, December 25.