Oscar winner Nicole Kidman is opening up on her latest role in erotic thriller Babygirl, revealing she had to pause filming during some of the more intimate bedroom scenes.

Australian A-lister Kidman, 57, who plays a high-powered CEO who risks her career for an affair with a young intern, won a best actress award at the Venice Film Festival in August for her role.

It earned a seven-minute standing ovation after the premiere.

Since then, she’s been on the speaking circuit, pairing with writer-director Halina Reijn and UK actor Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness) who plays the intern, candidly talking about faking orgasms in the sex scenes.

She said it was often too much to cope with and they would have to take a break.

“There was an enormous amount of sharing and trust and then frustration,” she said in a Q&A chat at the Crosby Hotel in New York.

“It’s like, ‘don’t touch me’.

“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’.”

Kidman added that it was “so present” all the time that “it was almost like a burnout”.

During an earlier Q&A session at the London West Hollywood in Los Angeles after a screening of the film, Kidman was asked about exploring “kink” in the film.

“I’ve always been on a quest as an actor, I’m always going, where have I not been? And what can I explore as a human being? And this was an area I’d never been,” People reported.

“There’s a sort of a jump off the cliff thing where you go, OK, I’m just going to abandon everything and explore this with the people that I trust in a genre that is already set, but hopefully we can explore new territory and especially with the female at the helm.

“You have your director at the helm going, ‘I will protect you. Nothing that’s going to be in the film will be anything that you are not comfortable with. You are going to be OK’.”

‘Disturbing’

Director Reijn was inspired by the 1992 Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone hit Basic Instinct, and hearing the story about a woman who had never experienced sexual pleasure in her 25-year marriage.

Kidman, who shares two daughters with Australian musician Keith Urban, had not met Reijn before filming last December, but is no stranger to the genre.

She’s participated in an orgy scene with Tom Cruise in the 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut, and engaged in what’s described as a “disturbing bedroom game” with Colin Farrell in Killing Of A Sacred Deer in 2017.

For Babygirl, she said there was “nothing that was too hard”, just days “when it was too much”.

She then admitted to the crowd that someone had told her it was “the most disturbing film” they’d ever seen.

The Sun said it’s her “raunchiest performance” so far.

Nicole Kidman starred in Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut with then husband Tom Cruise. Photo: AAP

‘Exposing’

Babygirl, which also stars Antonio Banderas as her husband, has also screened at the Toronto and Zurich film festivals, and is scheduled for release in December.

Filmed entirely on location in New York, Kidman plays Romy, who is lured into increasingly demanding sexual trysts while trying to maintain the dignity of a high-flying executive.

Just before the film’s Venice premiere, Kidman admitted to Vanity Fair that Babygirl was the sort of film you do, and “then hide in your home videos”.

“I’ve made some films that are pretty exposing, but not like this.”

Kidman and Dickinson had intimacy co-ordinators to structure the sex scenes, and Kidman trusted Reijn like a sister.

Among the first reviews, The Hollywood Reporter said Reijn cleverly kept upending the expectation the film was a “’90s sexual stalker thriller”.

“Watching Kidman hike up her elegant gown to get on all fours and lap up a saucer of milk is both horrifying and funny.

“[She] is in spectacular form, swinging from outrage to fear to ravenously lustful consent.”

The film left Kidman “ragged”, “exposed as an actor, as a woman, as a human being”, but is quick to remind her New York audience she didn’t see making the R-rated film as a “risk”.

“I see it as an opportunity,” she said.