How ‘glacial’ Nicole Kidman became Hollywood’s most sexually daring star

Nicole Kidman in The Paperboy
Nicole Kidman in The Paperboy

In her new film Babygirl, Nicole Kidman pushes the boat out. At 57, she gets on all fours, at the request of Harris Dickinson, who plays a young intern at the tech company run by her character. She laps up cream from a saucer during one of their assignations.

Sexually unfulfilled by her husband (Antonio Banderas), she watches pornography while the camera holds tight on her face in close-up, capturing every juddering spasm of pleasure. She also gets hold of one of Dickinson’s ties, discarded at a party, and practically eats it.

None of this should actually come as a surprise, still less a jaw-dropping revelation. Kidman has always been one of the most physically unafraid of Hollywood’s A-list female stars. This is the same actress, after all, who was famously dubbed “pure theatrical Viagra” by this newspaper’s then-theatre critic, Charles Spencer, when she disrobed for her British stage debut, David Hare’s The Blue Room, at the Donmar Warehouse in 1998.

Kidman’s risk-taking in sexually adventurous roles goes well beyond just nudity, though. The Blue Room was an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler; so was Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which was sold on the ooh-la-la cachet of inviting viewers into the inner sanctum of the Cruise-Kidman marriage, imagining flagrant infidelities and matter-of-factly showing Alice Harford’s bathroom routines.

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There are plenty more Kidman turns which give the lie to any dim notion that she’s a glacial or inhibited performer, or carefully “classy” in a Grace Kelly way. She’s vibrant and loose in Moulin Rouge! (2001); vampish and conniving in Malice (1993). Her career has involved frequent risks in this regard, more than many of her peers.

After all, when was the last time you saw Cate Blanchett being ravaged up against a washing machine in a Miami flop-house? Name a film in which Meryl Streep squats in a bikini over the prone form of Zac Efron on a beach, and urinates on him to relieve a severe reaction to being stung by jellyfish. Or, find a Michelle Williams character who visits her fiancé in prison and brings him to climax from the other side of the room, while dressed like a rapacious vixen from a Russ Meyer skin-flick and full-throatedly moaning.

Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut
Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut

All three of these exploits belong to The Paperboy, Kidman’s ferociously lurid 2012 collaboration with writer-director Lee Daniels, alongside a juicy big-name cast which also included Matthew McConaughey, John Cusack and David Oyelowo. Star-packed as it was, this Florida-set crime drama, based on a 1995 thriller by Pete Dexter, made a very limited splash at the time – indeed, it was a pronounced box-office flop, grossing just $3.8m worldwide off a $12.5m budget.

The plot is absolutely deranged. Kidman’s character, Charlotte Bless, is a constantly lustful Alabama floozy who, through a pen-pal correspondence, has fallen recklessly in love with a Death Row convict called Hillary Van Wetter (Cusack), a swamp-dwelling alligator hunter convicted for gunning down a local sheriff in Florida.

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Charlotte is convinced of Van Wetter’s innocence, and seeks the help of an investigative reporter called Ward Jansen (McConaughey) to exonerate him. Ward’s younger brother Jack (Efron) is enlisted as their driver, and becomes quietly besotted with Charlotte, who rebuffs him, not wanting to ruin their friendship.

The Paperboy was widely panned on its world premiere in Cannes 2012. In a typical review, the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman called it “deliriously tawdry and nonsensical”. Our very own Robbie Collin bestowed just one star, quipping that “in the grand scheme of dogs’ dinners”, it was “a ten-course canine tasting menu with wine pairings”.

The film’s brazen disregard for good taste invited these savagings. But so did unveiling it in Cannes competition, which is the rough equivalent of scoffing Ferrero Rochers at the ambassador’s ball, surrounded by luminaries in black tie, while sporting nothing but a hot pink thong. It was guaranteed to be ridiculed, and came away predictably empty-handed.

Bruised by the critical reaction, Daniels later claimed that it nearly made him give up directing altogether. (He was already set to roll on his 2013 historical drama The Butler – a far more tedious business – but the long gap between that and Daniels’s next film, 2021’s The People vs Billie Holiday, bears out his assertion.)

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A one-of-a-kind but wildly erratic filmmaker, Daniels would never have scored the prestige of a Cannes berth for The Paperboy if it hadn’t been for Precious (2009), a major awards hit which got six Oscar nominations, winning for the screenplay and Mo’Nique’s performance as the titular troubled schoolgirl’s mother.

What the acclaim for Precious on paper doesn’t tell you is that, as prime Oscar bait goes, it’s one of the least “classy” plays in Academy history: it’s rough, confrontational, flagrantly melodramatic and sails right along the cusp of camp. In The Paperboy, with Kidman’s help, Daniels took us over the edge.

John Cusack, Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman, director Lee Daniels and Zac Efron at the Cannes 2012 premiere of The Paperboy
John Cusack, Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman, director Lee Daniels and Zac Efron at the Cannes 2012 premiere of The Paperboy - Getty

No one could quite take it seriously until they realised they weren’t meant to. When the film traipsed back for its commercial release, audiences steered clear. Critics, though, started to concede that the film’s trashy voltage was entertaining, the problematic elements were at least worth discussing, and that there was something knowingly ridiculous about it from top to bottom. One of them was Robbie: recanting that one star, he gave it a hefty overhaul to a four, calling it “a heady mirage of sex, swamps and soul music that wants nothing more than for you to share in the joke. Thank goodness I finally got it.”

Within The Paperboy itself, the person who seems most in on that joke, and commits most forcefully to all of its punchlines – from rabid sex to emergency weeing – is undoubtedly Kidman. It was admitted, initially in hushed tones, that she was amazing in the movie; this talk gathered force, and by December she was a hair’s breadth away from scoring an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. (The Golden Globes and SAG awards both found her a spot, but she was pushed out by a surprise Oscar nod for Jacki Weaver in Silver Linings Playbook.)

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Perhaps contemplating the most-discussed scene in the film – the urine special with Efron on the beach – put voters off. But it’s certainly one of the highlights of Kidman’s performance, and not only because of one instantly meme-able line: “If anyone’s gonna piss on him, it’s gonna be me!”

Kidman owns the scene well before the jellyfish sting, as she firmly, almost maternally, keeps Efron’s character in the friend zone: “I’m not gonna blow a friendship over a stupid little blow job,” she tuts.

Kidman’s fearless unflappability in the role is all the more impressive given that it wasn’t meant to be hers. Sofia Vergara was originally cast as Charlotte, but dropped out, for what was cited as a scheduling clash with Modern Family, in early 2011. She wasn’t the only one: Cusack’s part was originally offered to Tobey Maguire, and Oprah Winfrey, who produced Precious, was approached by Daniels to play the Jansens’ former maid, Anita, who narrates.

“She said, ‘Absolutely not’,” Daniels explained. “And the universe took care of me, because I can’t imagine Oprah lying on a bed masturbating.” Macy Gray, of all people, stepped in, happy to do so.

Perhaps Maguire was put off by the general unsavouriness of Van Wetter, or perhaps – who knows? – the moment where he ejaculates through his trousers in jail. But it was Kidman and Efron who braved their director’s most scandalous demand on the third day of shooting, and even went the extra mile. (The first day, incidentally, was the washing machine semi-rape, and the second day was the telepathic prison sex. On the fourth day, you rather hope Kidman got to lounge around in her PJs while some other actors did their scenes.)

As Kidman disclosed in Cannes, the film’s infamous highlight was no stunt wee. The droplets we see land on Efron’s chest were Kidman’s very own urine. “Yes, I did the scene. That was what Lee wanted. It was in the script. And it’s pretty out there.”

“If you could have watched Zac’s face!” Daniels would later recall. “He’s supposed to be passed out and he’s just got this smile on his face.”

Unusually for the director who most recently got Glenn Close to spout unprintable filth as a possessed granny in The Deliverance, Daniels actually thought he’d gone too far with The Paperboy, and almost cut the jellyfish scene out. It was Kidman who talked him round, when he called her in an editing panic at 3am one morning. According to Daniels, she said, “Lee, you made me pee on Zac Efron. If you don’t put that in the movie, you’re out of your freakin’ mind. I did it! I did it!”

She did it, and she sells it perfectly as Charlotte exasperatedly stepping in to salve Jack’s stings, like a territorial wildcat protecting its kitten.

Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron in A Family Affair
Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron in A Family Affair - PA

There are whole books to be written on Kidman’s kinky history with younger men on screen. It all began with Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (1995), in which she slept with the delinquent teenager played by a lanky Joaquin Phoenix, to beguile him into killing her husband. In Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2003), which was glibly booed at its Venice premiere, she plays a floundering widow who kisses an insistent 10-year-old boy (Cameron Bright) because he claims to be the reincarnation of her dead spouse.

She wasn’t finished with Efron. Later in The Paperboy, their characters finally do hook up – except it’s the one sex scene in the film that we discreetly cut away from, unlike the aforementioned. In the Netflix romcom A Family Affair (2024), they were romantically reunited: he played a self-absorbed movie star, while she was the mother of his stressed PA.

Now we have Kidman’s Babygirl antics with a playful (and extremely skilful) Dickinson, who is nearly 30 years her junior. Babygirl is serious and silly at the same time, perhaps a little less scorching than you’ve heard, and an odd, thoughtful, exploratory drama about confused libidos. Put it side-by-side with The Paperboy, and it seems a tiny bit tame – but then so does everything.