Rob Lowe doesn’t understand why Nicole Kidman was called “brave” for starring in Babygirl sex scenes.
“Oh, they’re like, ‘It’s so brave. She’s so brave,’” Lowe, 60, said on the Thursday, February 27, episode of his “Literally!” podcast. “She’s brave because she has a sex scene? Like, that’s brave now. In our day, it was required. There was the ‘Page 73 Rule.’”
According to Lowe, a sex scene was “always” written on the 73rd page of a movie’s script.
“Like, you get a script and are like, ‘How gratuitous. Am I going to have to be naked in this? Let me check,’” he recalled. “You didn’t have to read the whole script. You just went to page 73 because of that mid-second act. What do you do in that mid-second act, which is notoriously the toughest sledding in storytelling? I know, they Blue Lagoon it [and] be with each other on a moonlit night. But, now it’s so brave.”
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Lowe and podcast guest Kristin Davis then mused how much “things have changed” in the industry since their respective early days as actors in Hollywood.
“I always feel, like, out of chaos comes opportunity,” Lowe said. “My attitude is always you make the most of it [and] disruption is actually a great place to build new things. If you can be one of the nimble ones and one of the forward-thinking ones, not entrenched and not trying to recreate yesterday, but try to understand tomorrow, it’s your time.”
Kidman, 57, had starred in 2024’s Babygirl, a psychosexual drama featuring an illicit age-gap romance between her and Harris Dickinson’s characters.
“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,” Kidman told The Hollywood Reporter in December 2024. “From the minute I read it, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a voice I haven’t seen, this is a place that I haven’t been, I don’t think audiences have been.’ My character has reached a stage where she’s got all this power, but she’s not sure who she is, what she wants, what she desires, even though she seems to have it all. And I think that’s really relatable.”
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Lowe, for his part, has acted in similarly promiscuous projects that did not yield the same praise as Babygirl.
“Kim Cattrell and I did a movie called Masquerade together,” he recalled on Thursday’s episode. “I love that movie. It got good reviews, but the studio kind of dumped it because they thought it was too sexy. It was pretty gratuitous … nobody has sex scenes in movies anymore.”
