I fell for Nicole Kidman somewhere between the red curls in Dead Calm and the moment in Eyes Wide Shut when she looks straight into a mirror and dares you to look away. Thirty-odd years later she won Venice for playing a CEO who takes orders from her intern, and the rest of Hollywood is still trying to work out how she keeps doing it.
Every Nicole Kidman Nude Scene, Ranked
Ranked on nerve, story and how much of the woman herself you actually get.
1. The Babygirl Hotel Room Strip (2024)
A CEO, an intern, an armchair and the longest walk out of her clothes in recent cinema.
2. The Eyes Wide Shut Mirror Scene (1999)
Chris Isaak on the stereo, Tom Cruise at her neck and her eyes on the mirror the whole time.
3. The Babygirl Milk Scene and Sex With Harris Dickinson (2024)
A saucer of milk, George Michael and the moment the power game turns into an affair.
4. The Paperboy Sex Scene With John Cusack (2012)
A death-row groupie finally gets her convict alone, and the washing machine takes a beating.
5. The Hemingway & Gellhorn Sex Scenes With Clive Owen (2012)
Madrid under the shells and two writers who can’t wait for the all-clear.
6. The Babygirl Opening Scene (2024)
The first two minutes tell you everything: a husband who tries, a wife who fakes it and a laptop down the hall.
7. The Big Little Lies Shower Scene (2017)
The marriage everyone in Monterey envies, seen from inside the bathroom.
8. The Paperboy Prison Visit (2012)
No touching, no nudity, a pair of torn pantyhose and the most notorious scene at Cannes that year.
9. The Babygirl Bed Scenes With Antonio Banderas (2024)
A pillow over her face, a husband who finally listens, and the smirk that ends the film.
10. The Cold Mountain Love Scene With Jude Law (2003)
A whole war of waiting, then one night by the fire.
11. The Killing of a Sacred Deer “General Anesthesia” Scene (2017)
Yorgos Lanthimos’ idea of marital foreplay: lie very, very still.
12. The Windrider Shower Scene (1986)
Where it all started: a Perth windsurfing romance, a shower built for two and a lot of red hair.
She has an Oscar, a shelf of Emmys and Globes, and a habit of saying yes to directors who want to go somewhere uncomfortable: Kubrick, Lee Daniels, Yorgos Lanthimos, Halina Reijn. Everything on this page comes from a film or an HBO show she signed up for, and every ranking is mine.
What isn’t here: the fake “sex tape” clips that float around, the Eyes Wide Shut orgy (not her, whatever the thumbnails say), and a handful of real scenes I left out on purpose. The Dead Calm sex scene is with the killer who has taken over her boat, and she only goes along with it to stay alive, so it’s out. The Billy Bathgate nude scene belongs to her affair with a teenage boy, so that’s out too. I’ll explain the rest in the questions at the bottom.
Watch First: The Babygirl Hotel Room (2024)
Romy Mathis runs a robotics company, has a lovely husband and has never once been told what to do. Then her intern, Samuel, sits down in a hotel armchair and tells her to take her clothes off. She laughs at him, stalls, and then does it, covering herself with her hands when she turns around, and the whole movie turns on that minute. It’s the most talked-about scene she has shot in twenty years, and the whole thing is on the Babygirl hotel strip page.
Stills, Film by Film
Grouped by title. Every frame is from a released film or show, and every frame is her. The video clips come from Scandal Planet’s Nicole Kidman collection, which is why they carry its watermark.
Babygirl
Eyes Wide Shut, The Paperboy and Hemingway & Gellhorn
Big Little Lies, Cold Mountain and The Killing of a Sacred Deer
What She Said About Getting Naked
She talks about this stuff more openly than almost anyone at her level, and she usually talks about control: who has it, who gets to use it. All quotes below are from the linked interviews.
Babygirl. The shoot wore her out. “There were times when we were shooting where I was like, ‘I don’t want to orgasm any more. Don’t come near me. I hate doing this,'” she told The Sun, as reported by The Independent. “It was so present all the time for me that it was almost like a burnout.” And the reason she did it, via HuffPost, quoting The Hollywood Reporter: “A lot of times women are discarded at a certain period of their career as a sexual being. So it was really beautiful to be seen in this way.”
Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick told her he wanted full-frontal nudity, and she wasn’t sure. “So we came up with a great agreement, which was contractual. He would show me the scenes with the nudity before they made it into the film. Then I could feel completely safe. I didn’t say no to any of it,” she told The New York Times Magazine, as quoted by IndieWire.
The Paperboy. The rough sex scene with John Cusack was one of the first things they shot. “It was horrifying but at the same time, it was great,” she told The Daily Beast. Cusack asked if she wanted to talk the scene through. She whispered in his ear, “I want to be your angel,” and they didn’t speak out of character until the film wrapped. Lee Daniels told Vulture that when he got nervous about the jellyfish scene in the edit, she said: “Lee, you made me pee on Zac Efron. If you don’t put it in the movie, you need to man up.”
Hemingway & Gellhorn. “I kept asking Phil Kaufman, the director, ‘Is all this sex important for the story?’ I wanted to make sure he wasn’t just getting off,” she told W magazine. “But these were two people who could make love when a building was falling down around them.”
Big Little Lies. “So many of the bruises you see on me aren’t fake. I had to do a shower scene where you would see a lot of them,” she told ELLE. “I also felt that the nudity was a part of it. It wasn’t about exploitation. It really feeds into their relationship.”
Why Now: Practical Magic 2
Practical Magic 2 put her and Sandra Bullock back in the Owens house nearly thirty years after the first one, and it opened at number one at the North American box office this month, per ABC News. Every time a new Kidman film opens, the searches go straight back to Babygirl, and here we are.
From Dead Calm to Babygirl
She was born in Honolulu, grew up in Sydney, and broke out internationally with Dead Calm in 1989. Hollywood called, then Tom Cruise, then Kubrick. She won the best actress Oscar for The Hours, played a courtesan in Moulin Rouge! and a Southern belle in Cold Mountain, and when the big studios got nervous about women over forty she went to television and made Big Little Lies, which won her an Emmy.
The nude filmography follows the same line. Kubrick gave her approval over every naked frame of Eyes Wide Shut. Lee Daniels got a performance she called horrifying and great in the same sentence. And in her mid-fifties she carried an erotic thriller about a woman who has never had an orgasm with her husband, and took the best actress prize at Venice for it. Most careers get more careful with time. Hers went the other way.
What’s Next
Practical Magic 2 is in theaters now. Beyond that I’m not listing rumors; when she signs on to something that’s actually been announced as nude, this page will get updated.
The Bar Argument at Closing Time
Is there a Nicole Kidman sex tape?
No. Nothing real has ever surfaced, and the clips sold under that name are either movie scenes with a new title or fakes. People searching for a Nicole Kidman sex tape usually end up at the same Babygirl and Paperboy scenes collected on this page.
Is that really her in the Eyes Wide Shut orgy?
No. Alice Harford is at home asleep while Bill wanders through the masked party. The women at the mansion are other performers. Her nude scenes in the film are the opening, the mirror scene and a fantasy sequence.
Why isn’t Dead Calm here?
Because the only sex scene in it is with Hughie, the killer who has taken her husband’s boat. She sleeps with him to buy time to save her husband, and the film plays it as something she does because she has no choice. That’s not a scene I’ll rank.
Why isn’t Birth here?
Birth has a brief adult love scene, but the film is about a ten-year-old boy who claims to be her dead husband. That’s not a film this site is going to mine for nude stills.
What about Billy Bathgate?
Its famous nude scene is part of her affair with Billy, who is a teenager in the story, so it stays out.
Was she an adult in Windrider?
Yes. Filming started in September 1985, after her eighteenth birthday that June, and she plays Jade, a grown-up rock singer. It was her first nude work, and it’s here.
Other Company Worth Keeping
- Harris Dickinson: Samuel, the intern in Babygirl.
- Antonio Banderas: Jacob, her husband in Babygirl.
- Tom Cruise: Dr. Bill Harford in Eyes Wide Shut, and her husband at the time.
- John Cusack: Hillary Van Wetter, the convict in The Paperboy.
- Zac Efron: Jack Jansen, the paperboy himself.
- Clive Owen: Ernest Hemingway in Hemingway & Gellhorn.
- Alexander Skarsgård: Perry Wright in Big Little Lies.
- Jude Law: W.P. Inman in Cold Mountain.
- Colin Farrell: Steven Murphy in The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
- Tom Burlinson: P.C., the windsurfer in Windrider.
More actresses
Same rules, other stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Amanda Seyfried, all ranked from officially released films and shows only.