'I don't think anyone knows I've been in a Disney movie'

Harris Dickinson tells Adam White about filming graphic sex scenes with Nicole Kidman in provocative thriller 'Babygirl', and explains why he'd hate his looks to be his 'sole currency'

- Adam White

Before he bossed her about and fed her dog biscuits, Harris Dickinson didn't know much about Nicole Kidman. He knew her films, of course, but Kidman herself - the woman behind all that cryptic, porcelain, slightly alien elegance - seemed a bit removed on the set of their BDSM drama Babygirl. “We didn’t talk a load,” Dickinson says, lying prone across a hotel room sofa. “We talked a lot about the characters we were playing. We didn’t talk about our personal lives or our feelings.”

He and Kidman are close now, but it was (almost) all business while making Babygirl, a frisky, funny plunge into erotic chaos and sub-dom mechanics that’s now in cinemas. She had to play the perma-botoxed tech CEO who can’t climax with her husband; he had to play the smirking intern who, like a randy telepath, senses in her a desperate urge to be treated like a very naughty girl who needs a good spanking. And it was hard!

Dickinson may be one of Britain’s most sought-after Hollywood exports – a wiry hunk with grit, humor and slippery vulnerability, whether it’s as the desperate supermodel of the satirical comedy Triangle of Sadness or the second fallen son of last year’s wrestling weepie The Iron Claw. But still: this is the Nicole Kidman. Acting royalty with a laundry list of bangers to her name. Dickinson respected the distance between them, not wanting to distract her from her process. But could he...? Just once...?

“Eventually I did ask, ‘What was it like working with Stanley Kubrick?’” Dickinson giggles, nervously. “Then another day would go by, and I’d say, ‘How was it with Lars von Trier?’ Then another would go by, and I’d say, ‘Sooo... Gus Van Sant, how was that?’”

Kidman was nice about it. She’d tell him stories. Entertain his fandom. Laugh.