‘Babygirl’ director Halina Reijn wants to “normalise” the movie’s age gap
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(Credit: A24)
In a new interview, Halina Reijn, the director of the new Nicole Kidman movie Babygirl has insisted the age gap between her two protagonists should be “normalised”.
Babygirl sees Kidman as the married CEO Romy explores an extramarital affair with her younger intern Samuel, played by Harris Dickinson. The romance and shifting power dynamic are vital to the story and play heavily on the age gap between the two leads.
Romy and Samuel are caught up in a steamy love affair, and while their ages are never explicitly mentioned, the age closeness between Samuel and Romy’s children is made clear and obvious.
It’s not the first of its kind, even this year. The Perfect Find and Lonely Planet have all seen older female leads engage in romance with younger male stars with visible age gaps. Kidman even starred in another effort this year, as she became entangled with Zac Efron in A Family Affair earlier this year.
With Kidman aged 57 and Dickinson at 28, some questions have been raised about their age gap. But the director has fought back in a new interview with W magazine and suggested the fixation is a little preposterous: “If we see a movie where the male actor is the same age as the female actor, we find that odd. Which is insane.”
“It should completely be normalised that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships,” the filmmaker continued in defence of the movie. Reijn seems to believe the issues arise from society’s predetermined view of women.
“We’re not trapped in a box anymore,” Reijn added. For her, there is a lot more work for us all to do if we are struggling to comprehend female-male age gaps: “We internalise the male gaze, we internalise patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.”
As well as being lustful, Reijn was also keen to give the sexual relationship between her two protagonists more texture; she wanted it to “feel incredibly hot and steamy and fun, but I also wanted them to be real. Sexuality is stop-and-go. It’s never like a glamour scene from a Hollywood movie in the 1990s. That’s just not how it works.”
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