BabygirlDirector Defends Age Gap Depicted in the Nicole Kidman Movie: 'It Should Completely Be Normalized'

Mar. 15, 2025

(L-R) Nicole Kidman, director Halina Reijn and Harris Dickinson at A24’s “Babygirl” Los Angeles Special Screening at The London West Hollywood at Beverly Hills on October 18, 2024 in West Hollywood, California.

Getty

“If we see a movie where the male actor is the same age as the female actor, we find that odd. Which is insane,” Reijn, 49, said. “It should completely be normalized that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships.”

“We’re not trapped in a box anymore,” Reijn added. “We internalize the male gaze, we internalize patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.”

L-R) Halina Reijn and Nicole Kidman attend a photocall for “Babygirl” during the 81st Venice International Film Festival at on August 30, 2024 in Venice, Italy.

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“Sexuality is stop-and-go. It’s never like a glamour scene from a Hollywood movie in the ’90s. That’s just not how it works,” she added.

Nicole Kidman and Babygirl director Halina Reijn on the Babygirl set

A24

“I found so much fun in the fact that America to me has a kind of suppressed relationship towards sex, and I do too,” Reijn said. “I really relate to it. So America serves as a metaphor of my own struggles with this theme.”

“From the minute I read it, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a voice I haven’t seen, this is a place that I haven’t been, I don’t think audiences have been,’ " Kidman added. “My character has reached a stage where she’s got all this power, but she’s not sure who she is, what she wants, what she desires, even though she seems to have it all. And I think that’s really relatable.”

source: people.com