Nicole Kidman on Babygirl and Pushing Herself to the Limit

Nicole Kidman, dressed in a slim black pantsuit, white shirt, and high-heeled pumps, was in a cluttered Chelsea loft carefully studying images created by the artist Robert Longo for his early-1980s masterwork “Men in the Cities.” “I like this one,” she said, fixating on a woman in a white dress with a full skirt, her body twisting away from the viewer. “You can see her abandon and determination in that moment.” She smiled. “I’m always fascinated by complicated emotions.”

In her latest film, Babygirl, Kidman plays a woman who is overwhelmed by her sexual desires. Happily married and the mother of two teenage children, her character finds herself inexorably drawn to a much younger intern in her office, played by Harris Dickinson, after she happens to see him gently calm an angry dog. Their affair, rife with BDSM elements, threatens to unravel her life—she is, after all, his boss—but she can’t stop herself. He speaks to her deepest longings.

For her intense, sometimes shocking, and often surprisingly subtle work in Babygirl, Kidman won the Best Actress prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The film is consistent with other bold choices that Kidman, who has never shied away from taking on dark or unexpected characters, has made throughout her career. In To Die For, she brilliantly played Suzanne, an aspiring local TV personality who persuades three students to murder her husband. This was not the kind of part that most newcomers in Hollywood crave. “It wasn’t about what’s sympathetic or not sympathetic,” she told me. “I just wanted to come to America and have the chance to try things. I was hungry. I had seen Drugstore Cowboy—and I loved it. To Die For was also directed by Gus Van Sant, and it’s so well written and so funny. I got the humor of it. I was like, ‘Come on, let me at it!’ ”

It continued from there: She was almost unrecognizable as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, for which she received an Oscar for Best Actress; urinated on Zac Efron in The Paperboy; spent years working with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut, which was also about sexual fantasy; and won an Emmy for her portrayal of a battered wife in Big Little Lies. Kidman also embraced high glamour in films like Moulin Rouge and in television miniseries like The Undoing. In 2010, she and her business partner, Per Saari, founded Blossom Films, a production company, and in 2017 Kidman publicly promised to work with a female director every 18 months. “I knew about Halina Reijn, and I heard she was directing a film called Babygirl,” recalled Kidman. “I was in Australia and I called Halina, and we didn’t get off the phone for almost two hours. From that point on, we were doing the film together.”

The title has special significance for Kidman: Babygirl is the nickname given to her by her husband, Keith Urban. “He actually has babygirl tattooed on the back of his neck!” she exclaimed. “I don’t know if Halina knows that, but it’s all part of this sprinkling of fairy dust that happens.” Kidman paused. “Keith’s not allowed to call anyone else Babygirl,” she said with mock seriousness. “But now, because of the film, it’s taken on a different meaning. So he’s like, ‘No, I still have total rights over Babygirl!’ ”

Kidman was called away to begin W’s photographic homage to “Men in the Cities.” It was a bright, sunny fall day, and we climbed the stairs to the roof of the building. She began to pose in front of a magnificent view of the West Side of Manhattan. Kidman, who had quickly understood the movements required to create Longo’s images, began a feverish dance, her legs apart and her head and arms in motion. There was no thought of looking pretty—instead, she concentrated solely on capturing an emotion. Longo once said, “I’m real interested in that feeling that happens when someone you love leaves you.… I want a gasp or almost a cry. To find that kind of joy and sadness.” Kidman had not heard that quote, but intuitively understood what he was trying to evoke. As she tossed her body around, her commitment was riveting.

After a couple of setups in different locations and with different outfits, an assistant placed large pieces of cardboard on the ground and Kidman lay on her back. She didn’t look comfortable. I was reminded of something she had said about a pivotal scene in To Die For, when she had to dance in the rain. “It was cold,” she’d said. “And I was like, yeah, I’m going to go out and dance in the headlights of this car. I just remember that it was freezing, but because I’d worked so much in Australia, I was used to hard conditions.”

Kidman’s stretched-out position also harked back to some very intimate scenes in Babygirl. It is a brave performance, although Kidman doesn’t necessarily see it that way. “Playing this character didn’t scare me at all,” she had said earlier. “It captivated me. It pulled me in. I wanted to make sure that I fulfilled Halina’s vision. But on the first day, I started to go, ‘This is going to be very exposing.’ And there were different points when it was like, ‘I don’t want to be looked at, touched in any way anymore. No more, no more, no more.’ ”

An interesting aspect of Babygirl is that the perspective is thoroughly female, as opposed to the usual cinematic experience of viewing sex through a male point of view. “It is very much a woman’s story,” said Kidman. “But I learned early on that a film is actually not about me—it is really about a vision, and how do you go and capture that vision?”

As if to prove that point, Kidman was now contorting her long legs into different shapes—first a kind of triangle, then a bit of a pretzel, and, finally, a sleeping position with her knees bent. She pushed her long hair out of her eyes but let it rest across her face. She seemed to be caught in a powerful dream.

For the next setup, Kidman stood up and posed against the skyline in a dramatic backbend. As a girl, she studied dance before she found acting. “My mom was working,” said Kidman. “So we always had to find things to do in the afternoon. I did ballet and then mime work, and when I was 13 they found me a little weekend drama school. We did the Tennessee Williams play Sweet Bird of Youth. I was playing the Princess [an older, once famous actor who is involved with a young gigolo], and I had no understanding of what the actual text meant. The director Jane Campion came and sat in the back of that little theater and then cast me in one of her student films. But I didn’t do it—I didn’t want to wear a shower cap in the film and not look pretty.” Kidman paused. “Huge regret. What a big regret!” Maybe that was Kidman’s lesson learned: It was the last time that she gave in to vanity when art was a possibility.

After the final shot, Kidman stood up straight and stretched out her arms. She was back to being herself. “Are you happiest when you’re someone’s muse?” I asked her, as she prepared to leave. “I’m happiest when I’m challenged,” she said. “That has always been my passion.” —Lynn Hirschberg

Robert Longo on Revisiting “Men in the Cities”

Robert Longo and the W team were discussing the shoot he was orchestrating with Nicole Kidman. His instructions were focused and direct. “Nothing new—don’t step outside of the established vocabulary,” he said of the poses Kidman was to assume. “Not balletic, not fashion, not posed. The movements have to be slightly awkward, almost psychotic. The body has to be stretched to the point of impossibility. No smiling.” He was equally adamant about the styling: “White shirts, black ties, skinny suits, black heels. No patterns, frou-frou, tassels, polka dots, bags, or jewelry—none of that shit. It has to be really elegant and clean.”

We were huddled in his downtown Manhattan studio—a soaring, loftlike space covered with a nearly uniform layer of charcoal, the by-product of decades of Longo working on the black and white, hyperrealistic drawings that have made him one of the most instantly recognizable artists of his generation. Longo has created memorable images of massive breaking waves, atomic blasts, and the buildings that house America’s branches of political power; he also directed videos for R.E.M. and New Order, as well as the film Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves, and headed Robert Longo’s Menthol Wars, an experimental punk music band in the 1970s that included Richard Prince. Still, he is best known for his “Men in the Cities” series of the early 1980s, in which he photographed downtown characters—including friends like the artist Cindy Sherman and the budding art dealer Larry Gagosian—in contorted positions that suggested an unsettling backstory. Many of those images then became drawings.

“If you’re lucky enough to get into art history books, you only get one image, unless you’re a major epic artist,” said Longo. “I am in art history books, but just for ‘Men in the Cities,’ not all the other stuff I did my whole life.” The series has achieved cultlike status, not only because of the technical proficiency of Longo’s work but also because of its inherent stylishness—there is the mythical New York skyline, and an innate sense of cool that his subjects project. Because of the time when the work was produced, many assumed that the suited-up men and women were a commentary on the yuppie culture that was coming out of a newly ascendant Wall Street. “That killed me,” Longo said, explaining that the outfits were inspired by a completely different crowd. “Broadway kind of divided the downtown scene to me—east of Broadway were the punks with the green hair and the leather jackets and pushpins. West of Broadway was this kind of No Wave scene where everyone looked like they came out of film noir, like a French film: skinny lapels, but kind of austere. I went after that. I wanted people to have these urban uniforms.”

At the time, Longo took extreme measures to capture the poses he envisioned in his head, sometimes hurtling tennis balls and other objects at his subjects. “I had grown up with the blossoming of violence in cinema,” he said. “There was a major change in the way people died in movies. James Cagney would just get shot, fall over, and go, ‘Ugh.’ And then with Sam Peckinpah, a guy would get blown through the wall. Those dances of death were quite amazing. As a kid, I played this game called Who Could Fall Dead the Best. I was interested in that moment of impact.”

Aware that bombarding Kidman with projectiles was not a possibility, Longo decided to start with the images he had created more than 40 years ago and go backwards. Examining his early output was an interesting detour for him; this year, he has been busy exhibiting very different bodies of work. In September, the Albertina Museum, in Vienna, opened “Robert Longo,” a retrospective centered on his depiction of power in nature, politics, and history. From there he went to London, where he debuted “Searchers” at Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac galleries, featuring large-scale, five-panel multimedia pieces. And at the Milwaukee Art Museum, he inaugurated “Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History” with a series of monumental drawings addressing weighty topics including the 2014 Ferguson riots and the killing of George Floyd.

Ultimately, though, Longo was thrilled with the results of this project. “The whole process was bizarre, to re-create this stuff,” he said. “But I think it looks pretty great. I mean, Nicole worked really hard. She really got it. There’s one picture where she’s just walking and turning. It’s all attitude—just so beautiful. It’s amazing how much meaning can come across in a gesture.” The fact that the artworks he created so long ago have become part of the cultural lexicon and continue to resonate was not lost on him. “What is weird about making iconic images is that you lose authorship over them,” he said. “At a certain point, they are not part of you anymore.” —Armand Limnander

Style Director: Allia Alliata di Montereale. Hair by Adir Abergel for Virtue Labs at A-Frame Agency; makeup by Gucci Westman for Westman Atelier at the Wall Group; manicure by Deborah Lippmann for Deborah Lippmann at Home Agency. Set design by Jacob Burstein at MHS Artists. Movement direction by Pat Boguslawski at Streeters. Studio manager to Robert Longo: Alex Baye.

Produced by AP Studio, Inc.; executive producer: Alexis Piqueras; producer: Anneliese Kristedja; production coordinator: Jackson Wakefield; photography assistants: Nick Krasznai, David Eristavi, Justin Tellian; digital technician: Kylie Coutts; retouching: Dtouch Creative; fashion assistants: Tori López, Molly Cody, Tyler VanVranken; production assistants: Linnette Estrella, Ariana Kristedja, Cameron Bevans, Billy Penny; hair assistant: Monique Francis; makeup assistant: Laura Pantoja; set assistant: Cullen O’Grady; tailor: Lucy Falck.