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.”
