To be honest, Harris Dickinson never seriously considered who’s really the titular Babygirl in Halina Reijn’s erotic drama. “I didn’t know really that Samuel would’ve ever been the babygirl,” he tells Vanity Fair over Zoom. That makes sense. As Samuel, the sexually dominant half of a kinky couple completed by Romy, an older and sexually submissive executive played by Nicole Kidman, Dickinson is the one calling all the shots—making Romy get on her knees, lap up milk, and fill out his (well, really, their) sexual fantasies. It was clear to him that the title must refer back to Kidman.
And then he went online.
“I mean…it’s an interesting definition. I’m just going to google it again,” Dickinson says. From the NoMad hotel, he reads an internet definition of “babygirl” aloud: “A term used to describe men who are considered attractive, cute, or vulnerable.” He takes a moment to consider it. Dickinson is too modest to weigh in on whether Samuel is attractive or cute, but he does agree on one point: “He’s vulnerable, for sure.”
What makes the character that way is a bit of a mystery. In the film, Samuel seemingly comes out of nowhere to intern for Romy and subsequently rock her world. “I did a lot of work trying to figure out Samuel’s world and his history,” says Dickinson. “But I think there was a lot of stuff that I didn’t really want to answer. There were purposeful things in the script that left him pretty ambiguous and unreliable in terms of his story.” He points to a scene in which, after an unexpected visit to Romy’s upstate house, Samuel tells her children that his father is dead. “Halina was very adamant that I could just kind of make stuff up, because I think he was a bit of a liar.”
“He is someone who’s a little broken, and he’s trying to find ways to seem not broken, like everyone in this world,” Dickinson continues. “We all do things and say things that are a little unreliable to appear together, I think. But when he’s with Romy, he’s just himself…or able to connect with the part of himself that is true.”
To dramatize Samuel and Romy’s complicated psychosexual dynamic, Dickinson and Kidman had to remain somewhat mysterious to each other during filming. “I don’t think we really got to know each other until later on in the film,” the actor says. “It was this unspoken thing where we were like, ‘We’re not going to try and get to know our real selves whilst we’re doing this, because it might be difficult otherwise.’ There had to be an element of unknown between the characters because of how much was unknown in the story, and that was kind of the appealing thing for the both. So it wasn’t until later on that we started to get close as actual Harris and Nicole.”
The pair only had one day of rehearsal before they began shooting. Despite the tight schedule, Dickinson says that he and his costar were able to take their time during production to make sure they were getting it right. “If it wasn’t right, if it wasn’t working, we would always workshop it and change it, and Halina would rewrite and find the best possible version,” he says. Dickinson credits his scene partner for creating an environment where that type of work was possible. “Nicole encourages that collaboration and play,” he continues. “Clearly, from her work, she’s interested in all different types of cinema. She’s got an inquisitive nature, and she’s got a bravery that she leads with.”
Courtesy of A24.
It would seem that both actors certainly had to be brave during their many intimate scenes—though for Dickinson, that may have been the easy part. “Actually, the more intimate scenes are relatively straightforward,” he says. “It’s blocking and then finding the truth of it.” He credits Reijn and Babygirl’s “really amazing” intimacy coordinator, Lizzy Talbot, for creating a safe, open, and loving environment for the actors to work in, which Dickinson says is “ultimately what gets you to a place of truth with each other.” And of course, there’s also Kidman to thank. “She’s funny as well, Nicole,” he adds. “She can be very serious and diligent, but then she can crack a joke and be very, very normal. I think that just helps. It’s not like, a stiff environment.”
A certain lightness on set must be nice when your job requires you to explore the darker, more taboo parts of your psyche. “It was always about the darkness,” says Dickinson. “It was always about, ‘How much are we in touch with our darkness, and how much do we try and suppress it?’” Dickinson finds himself returning to one particular moment from the script: “Samuel, when he’s in the bed with Romy, he says, ‘Sometimes I scare myself. Do you think I’m a bad person?’ He’s aware of the fact that he’s having an affair with someone who’s got a husband and kids—a family. And he’s aware that he’s the one that kind of instigated it.”
For Dickinson, that internal conflict is where Samuel’s mysterious vulnerability lies. “I think that he understands that it is a bad thing that he’s doing,” he says. “Young men dealing with aggression and anger and tumultuous emotions, and figuring out what that means, and figuring out how to speak to that and control it in a way that’s not just ignoring it. I think it’s something we can all relate to. How we’re taught to be what masculinity means and what femininity means—the idea that if we’re raised in a world to be strong, and then that comes crumbling down, what does that mean?”
While there may not be a clear answer to his query, Dickinson is excited that his work in Babygirl is even asking the question. “We had another screening last night. Everyone had a lot to say,” he says with a laugh. “It seems to be more than just like, ‘Oh, that was great,’ and then move on. I don’t know whether it’s someone’s own restraint being liberated a little bit, or just relating to Romy or me. People are just latching onto it in a palpable way.”
But though audiences are just starting to get attached to Babygirl and Samuel, Dickinson himself has already let them go. He’s reportedly circling the role of John Lennon in Sam Mendes’s four-part biopic about the Beatles. Though Dickinson won’t say outright whether he’s in the mix for the part, “it would be a really interesting role,” he says. “John Lennon is someone I’ve looked at as a really complex figure, so to step into that would be challenging as an actor. It’d be a great challenge.”
He hasn’t spent much time wondering what Samuel might get up to after he walks barefoot out of Romy’s upstate house—and, presumably, her life. “If I’m being totally honest, I don’t think about what happens once my thing is done in the film,” Dickinson says. “I only think about what is before and what is maybe during. Once it’s out of the story, I have no reason to imagine what they do.”
Although, actually, he may have an inkling: “I imagine him moving to Tokyo and doing it all over.”
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