Nicole Kidman wanted Harris Dickinson for Babygirl after seeing his cat: 'You're perfect'

Nicole Kidman needed to find the right younger man to play her love interest in Babygirl — and a feline friend helped seal the deal.

The Eyes Wide Shut actress explained how she first connected with Harris Dickinson for her new erotic thriller during a conversation with Zendaya for Variety's Actors on Actors. Kidman said that director Halina Reijn floated the Iron Claw actor as a possible option to play Samuel, the intern character who becomes romantically involved with her CEO protagonist Romy.

"We Zoomed with him, and it just clicked," Kidman recalled. "As soon as I saw his cat walk through, I was like, 'You're perfect. You're really, really good for this.' And he was just so nice."

Kidman is a noted admirer of cats — the actress and her husband, Keith Urban, adopted a rescue cat named Louis during the pandemic, and they already had two other cats in their household at that point. She has also celebrated her childhood cats on social media in the past, and was reportedly offered the role of Catwoman in a project that eventually became the 2004 film starring Halle Berry.

Elsewhere in the interview, Kidman also said that Antonio Banderas, who plays her character's husband in the film, brought a gracious disposition to the project. "[He] came in and said, 'I wanna support you women, I wanna give to you, and I want you to create something that I feel is really important,'" she recalled. "And to have those two men going, 'We're here with you,' they're so — they're very generous. Beautifully generous actors, and I think that's how things get formed."

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

The actress noted that finding like-minded collaborators is an essential part of her creative process. "So much of it is, 'We're having such good conversations anyway, like what we'd be having around a dinner table talking or at a party,'" Kidman said. "When I really know you, the intimacy and the ability to kinda share some of your deepest, darkest secrets — I'm sort of addicted to that."

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly last month, Dickinson reflected on collaborating with Kidman to create a complex, ever-shifting power play. "I had to try and hold my own because, given Samuel's dynamic, I couldn't really go in and be a kid quaking in my boots," he recalled. "I had to own it a bit, be myself and try and get past the mystique of Nicole."

Dickinson continued, "She is a provocative, thoughtful, intelligent artist that wants to push the envelope in every sense of the word. She's radical in her approach and bold every time. I'm just so grateful that I got to be a part of that."

Despite his appreciation for the film, however, Dickinson is already getting sick of people quoting one of his pivotal lines. "Someone came up to me off the street and said, 'Oh, can you say, 'Good girl?'" he remembered. "I said, 'No, come on, man. Don't ask me to say that.' People need to look past the eroticism of it. It's a very nuanced film. It's so much about liberation and the consequences of too much constraint. It's important that that's what people are talking about as well."

Babygirl hits theaters Christmas day.