One of the standout moments in Halina Reijn‘s erotic thriller “Babygirl” finds Nicole Kidman‘s Romy being sent a glass of milk from the young intern she’s having an affair with while they’re separately at the same bar. Romy accepts the challenge and finishes the entire glass in one sip. Later on, the intern leaves the bar and calls Romy a “good girl.” It’s a sensual and humorous moment, and it’s one that actually happened to Reijn in real life.
“The milk is, of course, an archetype. We’ve seen it in other movies. It is a great symbol of animalistic sides of ourselves. It happened to me,” the writer-director recently told IndieWire. “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,” Reijn continued. “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.”
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Reijn said that this young Belgian actor never went up to her and called her a “good girl,” although “I wish he did.”
“He just walked out. I didn’t have sex with him or anything. But when I was writing, I did think that was one of the most arousing moments of my life,” Reijn said. “There wasn’t even touching. 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.”
A24 opened “Babygirl” in theaters on Christmas Day and it earned $7 million at the domestic box office over its first five days. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman recently named “Babygirl” the eighth best movie of 2024.
“Reijn’s shrewdly honest and enveloping drama about a sadomasochistic affair is really, beneath its kinks (which are plenty sexy and entertaining), a portrait of a society that’s overly in thrall to the god of control,” Gleiberman writes. “That Romy is trashing every rule that governs relationships in the workplace is, for her, part of the turn-on. And the spark plug of Kidman’s indelible performance is that she plays this sick recklessness as something fully human: the expression of a woman too compartmentalized to put the different parts of herself together.”
“Babygirl” is now playing in theaters from A24.