While creating one of the most exciting scenes of the year, Halina Rein discovered that truth is often more exciting than fiction.
the Babygirl The writer-director explained how she came up with the scene in which Samuel (Harris Dickinson) sends his boss Romy (Nicole Kidman) a glass of milk at a bar and orders her to drink it, inspired by something that actually happened to her.
“Milk, of course, is the archetype. We've seen that in other films,” she explained to IndieWire. “It's a great symbol of the animal aspects of ourselves.”
“It happened to me,” Ryan added. I was playing in Belgium on stage, and I got off stage, and I had a really good tour, and I was like, “Oh my God!” I felt good about myself for one night in my life. All my classmates were like, “No, we're going to sleep.” They're all boring. I was alone. I went to the bar, ordered something boring like a Diet Coke because I didn't drink at the time because I was a control freak. There was this young Belgian actor – I can't say who he was – but he was famous. I knew about him. I never talked to him. He was at least 15 years younger than me, and he asked me for a glass of milk. I thought it was a cool and exciting thing to do, and very brave, so I wanted to reward him by drinking the whole thing, which I did. To be honest with you, it made me feel a little nauseous, because it was cow's milk. “That was once upon a time.”
Although the actor unfortunately never called me “good girl,” Ryan joked, “I wish he did. He just walked out. I didn't have sex with him or anything.”
Director Halina Reijn and Nicole Kidman on set Babygirl (2024) (Nico Tavernis/A24/Courtesy Everett Collection)
“But when I was writing, I thought that was one of the most exciting moments of my life. There wasn’t even touching,” she explained. “That's what fascinates me about sex. For me, real traumatic sex is often not two bodies crashing into each other. For me, real traumatic sex is about what's on the mind. It's all a suggestion. It's all fantasy. [Romy] He crawls on a dirty, stained carpet and licks a little treat off his hand, petting it like an animal – which to me is really sexy. The actual on-screen sex acts are, to me, extremely boring, which is why we only get two brief moments of that.
The A24 workplace thriller stars Kidman as Romy, a high-ranking executive who puts her career on the line when she begins an affair with her younger intern, Samuel (Dickinson).
