Babygirl‘s age gap is prominent both on the screen and in real life. The A24 movie was written and directed by Bodies Bodies Bodies‘ Halina Reijn, and was favorably received, with a Certified Fresh score of 76% on Rotten Tomatoes. While it was snubbed by the Oscars, Nicole Kidman picked up a Golden Globe nodn for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama, and Babygirl was also named one of the 10 best films of the year by the National Board of Review.
The Babygirl cast includes notable performers such as Antonio Banderas, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in his frequent collaborator Pedro Almodóvar’s 2019 movie Pain and Glory, and Sophie Wilde, who had her breakout role in the A24 horror hit Talk to Me. However, the core of the story centers on Kidman as CEO Romy Mathis and Harris Dickinson as her intern Samuel, with whom she engages in a prolonged affair that allows both of them to explore their idenтιтies and desires, even as it presents a danger to Romy’s professional and personal life.
Nicole Kidman Is Almost 30 Years Older Than Harris Dickinson
Their Birthdays Are Four Days Apart (In Different Decades)
At the time of Babygirl‘s release, which was December 25, 2024, Nicole Kidman was 57 years old, as the Oscar-winning actor was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on June 20, 1967. Meanwhile, Harris Dickinson was born in London, England, on June 24, 1996, making him 28 years old at the time of the movie’s debut. Filming took place between December 2022 and February 2023, making the actors 56 and 27, respectively, when the movie was sH๏τ. Because their birthdates are so close together, their age gap in real life is almost exactly 29 years.
The official screenplay… reveals [the characters’] ages in the screen directions.
This real-life age gap is similar to their characters in the movie. While their ages are not specifically detailed in dialogue, the official screenplay shared on A24‘s For Your Consideration website reveals their ages in the screen directions. When Romy is introduced, it is revealed that she is 49 years old. This makes sense, considering the facts that her oldest child is a teenager and that she has been married to her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), for 19 years, something that is specifically stated in dialogue.
The screenplay states that Jacob is 58 years old, making him nine years older than Romy.
Meanwhile, the official screenplay reveals that Samuel is 25 years old. While he does not have to be 21 to work his side job as a bartender, because bartenders can be 18 years of age in New York State, his age is corroborated by the fact that he is seen alongside Romy at various clubs and bars, the majority of which would most likely require guests to be 21 or older. The ages dictated by the screenplay leave the characters with a 24-year age gap, which is just five years shy of the actors’ actual age gap.
Why Babygirl’s Age Gap Is Important For The Story
It Highlights The Characters’ Power Dynamics
While the age gap in Babygirl could be seen as controversial, Halina Reijn recently explained her views on centering the movie around these two characters while speaking with W Magazine. She explained that relationships between older men and younger women have been completely normalized and that “we need to free ourselves” from internalizing the patriarchy. Read her full comments below:
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 normalized that the age gaps switch and that women have different relationships. We’re not trapped in a box anymore. We internalize the male gaze, we internalize patriarchy, and we need to free ourselves from it. It’s really hard.
In addition to gender-swapping the typical onscreen age gap, Babygirl uses the ages of its characters to further its exploration of the power dynamics at play in the story. While Romy has professional power over Samuel, he has personal power over her, as she is allowing herself to be more vulnerable with him than she has ever been with her husband. Additionally, his exposing their affair could also ruin her life, which is something she finds simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. The age gap and the way it affects perceived power dynamics serve to make the situation even more complicated.
Babygirl’s Age Gap Creates A Surprising Nicole Kidman Trend
Her Other Characters Have Also Had Relationships With Younger Man
The Babygirl age gap is far from a first for Nicole Kidman movies. In fact, she had already appeared in another 2024 age gap movie by the time the A24 тιтle premiered. She played the lead role in Netflix’s A Family Affair, which debuted on June 28 and followed an ᴀssistant (Joey King) finding herself caught in the middle when her celebrity boss (Zac Efron) and her mother (Kidman) fall in love. Efron was born in San Luis Obispo, California, on October 18, 1987, making him 37 years old and thus 20 years younger than his onscreen love interest.
A Family Affair was not even the first time Kidman had an onscreen tryst with Zac Efron, as the pair played lovers in the 2012 Lee Daniels movie The Paperboy, which premiered when Kidman was 45 and Efron was 24. Before that, she had also had an onscreen age gap affair in 1995’s To Die For, in which her character seduced a teenager played by Joaquin Phoenix, who was 20 when it premiered, compared to her age of 28. Therefore, Babygirl sees Kidman working in very familiar territory.
Babygirl’s Age Gap Compared To Similar Movies
Older Woman/Younger Man Romance Films Are Becoming More Common
While Babygirl‘s age gap is notable for having the woman being older than the man, there have been more movies lately adopting this trend, with Nicole Kidman’s own A Family Affair being one of the most notable. Alongside that, one of the most recent examples is The Idea of You, starring Anne Hathaway alongside Nicolas Galitzine, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video in 2024. While the age gap between Anne Hathaway (42) and Nicolas Galitzine (30) isn’t as large as Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson, it is still a major aspect of the film.
2024 featured several, actually, as Laura Dern (58) played opposite Liam Hemsworth (35) in Lonely Planet, where their romance blossoms at a writer’s getaway in Morocco. It’s even worth going back to 1967 for The Graduate, which features arguably the most popular older woman/younger man age gap in film history, as Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson struck up an affair with Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin, though the real-life gap between Anne Bancroft and Hoffman was only six years. Still, films like Babygirl go a long way in exploring different types of relationships on film.
Sources: A24 & W Magazine
