While creating one of the most erotic scenes of the year, Halina Reijn found out that truth is often sexier than fiction.
The Babygirl writer and director explained how she came up with the scene in which Harris Dickinson‘s Samuel sends a glass of milk to his boss Romy (Nicole Kidman) at a bar and orders her to drink it, inspired by something that actually happened to her.
“The milk is, of course, an archetype. We’ve seen it in other movies,” she explained to IndieWire. “It is a great symbol of animalistic sides of ourselves.”
Reijn added, “It happened to me. I was playing in Belgium onstage, and I got offstage, and I had a really good run, and I was like, ‘Oh my god!’ I felt really good about myself for one night in my life. All my colleagues were like, ‘No, we’re going to bed.’ They’re all boring. I was all alone. I went to a bar, and I ordered something boring like a Diet Coke because I didn’t drink at that time because I was a control freak. There was this young Belgian actor — I can’t say who it is — but he was famous. I knew of him. I’d never spoken to him. He was at least 15 years younger than I, and he ordered me a glass of milk. I thought it was an incredible, hot thing to do, and so courageous, and so I wanted to reward him by drinking the whole thing, and I did. It did make me a little nauseated, to be honest with you, because it was cow milk. It was back in the day.”
Although the actor unfortunately never said “good girl to me,” Reijn quipped, “I wish he did. He just walked out. I didn’t have sex with him or anything.
Director Halina Reijn and Nicole Kidman on the set of Babygirl (2024) (Niko Tavernise/A24/Courtesy Everett Collection)
“But when I was writing, I did think that was one of the most arousing moments of my life. There wasn’t even touching,” she explained. “That is what fascinates me about sex. To me, real, shocking sex is often not at all two bodies banging into each other. To me, real, shocking sex is about what is in the mind. It’s all suggestion. It’s all imagination. [Romy] crawling around on a dirty carpet with stains and licking a little bit of candy out of his hand, and him petting her like she’s an animal — that, to me, is really sexy. Real sex acts to me onscreen are quite boring, which is why we only have two short moments of that.”
The A24 erotic workplace thriller stars Kidman as Romy, a high-powered CEO who puts her life’s work on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern Samuel (Dickinson).