‘Breaking that mould’: Nicole Kidman argues that ‘Babygirl’ challenges Hollywood’s sexist career expectations for actresses

Hollywood is notoriously a man’s world. This aspect becomes most apparent when an actress starts aging, and the quality and depth of their roles become gradually shallower. Well, Nicole Kidman feels that with roles like Rory in Babygirl, she might finally be slowly breaking away from that stereotype.

Kidman’s Rory is a tech CEO who has intimacy issues with her husband because, due to her high-flying job, nobody dares question her authority — including her husband. That is, until she meets the significantly younger Samuel, played by Harris Dickinson, who reignites her ion.

Rory is a complicated and duplicitous character, something actresses the age of Kidman seldom get offered, The Substance, where older women are treated as more than just ing characters, someone was bound to ask Kidman whether she thinks last year was a watershed moment for the type of characters older women are offered in Hollywood.

In Kidman’s promo run for the film, she stopped by The Guardian, where peers and fans asked the celebrated actress about where she’s at in her life and career. One referenced the 1996 film The First Wives Club, which stated that an actress merely has three stages in her life: the babe stage, the district attorney stage, and the Driving Miss Daisy stage. Keri wanted to know if Kidman still finds this assessment true. Kidman replied she is determined for that not to be true and, rather than being ive, is doing all she can from her position to drive her star power into more women-directed films. In full, she said:

“We’re trying to break that. I’m really determined for that not to be true. Babygirl hopefully is part of breaking that mould, and trying to female directors means that will be changed ultimately. Because the more we have female voices in equal numbers in our cinema world, the more we’ll have stories told that break that mould.”

Nicole Kidman is one of the few actors whose fanbase crosses generations. She’s as beloved for roles like The Others among older fans who likely watched it on opening night as she is for her role in Big Little Lies, which younger audiences are still discovering right now on streaming.

So, it’s no surprise that she’s among the actresses at the forefront of this shift. In fact, in the same profile for The Guardian, she opened up about some of the roles and career moves she makes at this point in her illustrious career — such as trying to get on Amelia Dimoldenberg’s The Chicken Shop Date and pushing for Big Little Lies season 3 — moves she says are on the advice and behest of her teenage daughters.

The world is changing, albeit slowly, and Hollywood is not far behind. Fans are no longer satisfied with seeing older women as one-dimensional ing characters that only exist to enable the men around them to ‘find themselves.’ But perhaps the most interesting point in this conversation is that, according to Kidman, the best way to kick this trope out of Hollywood is to give women directors a shot at major Hollywood productions. If the quality of such movies that came out last year is anything to go by, that’s a great place to start.