Adéla Nicole Kidman video

The tradition of pop and rap musicians naming their songs after notable icons is hardly new. There was Robbie Williams with 2006’s “She’s Madonna,” Nicki Minaj with 2012’s “Marilyn Monroe,” Drake with 2015’s “Madonna,” Lana Del Rey with 2018’s “Elvis” (originally recorded in 2008), Armani White with 2022’s “Billie Eilish” and Jack Harlow with 2022’s “Dua Lipa” (2022 was apparently a big year for embracing more modern pop stars in song title form).

In other words, icons inspire icons (even though Nicki Minaj has been stripped of that status now that she’s a MAGA lackey and Armani White and Jack Harlow could hardly be described using that word, but you get the picture). Now entering the niche category of naming their songs after famous people with “Nicole Kidman” (the latest single from Prima) is Adéla, herself recently famous but meteorically rising to the point where, by next year, someone might be naming a song after her.

Until then, Adéla is happy to embody the fangirl role by paying respect to Nicole Kidman (much like Charli XCX and Troye Sivan, the latter of whom recently got Kidman to star in his “She’s the Best” video), a woman who seems to get more acclaim and even better roles the older she gets. Which is no small feat as an actress, no matter how “legendary” you are. Among the latest examples of such acclaim and such a role being 2024’s Babygirl, which Adéla references in both the song and the Hannah Lux Davis-directed video (and yes, you know you’ve really made it as a pop singer when Lux Davis is on board). One that centers on recreating some of Kidman’s most memorable parts, including as Satine in Moulin Rouge.

Indeed, that’s the first “persona” Adéla takes on in the intro scene, smiling at the applause she hears as confetti rains down on her. A quick cut then shows her snipping off her hair and standing in a corner like Kidman as Romy Mathis in Babygirl before another quick cut reveals her standing in front of her bedroom window wearing a dress with a plunging backline that she proceeds to let drop to the floor. An obvious nod to Kidman doing the same (in John Galliano) as Alice Harford in 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut (famously known as Stanley Kubrick’s final film).

As the Kanye West/“Bound 2”-inspired voice manipulations proceed, Adéla picks out one of the Hollywood Walk of Fame star-shaped keychains from a rack filled only with “Nicole Kidman” ones before she gets back into character as Romy and starts crawling on the floor toward, well, herself (“self-love,” after all, is one of the messages here). She then confidently delivers the opening verse, “Every single night/I pray that my tits are sittin’ right/Moulin Rouge/My corset is so tight/Babygirl, in control/I feel like Nicole.” The compliment of attributing Kidman and the roles she tends to select as a symbol of empowerment is one that the actress clearly enjoyed getting as no sooner was the single released than she was using it as a backing track on one of her social media posts promoting Practical Magic 2.

As for Adéla likening Kidman to the epitome of a powerful puta, she keeps building on that lore with a line like, “And every single day/I wake up, the world is my buffet.” Kidman only corroborated that sentiment with the interview she gave for her British Vogue cover in September, chock-full of memorably comments, though none quite like the ones that yielded the meme-worthy paragraph,

“‘London, Ibiza, Paris, Portofino…’ she reels off her travels these past weeks. ‘A Euro summer,’ she adds, a nod to singer Zara Larsson’s current sunshine earworm, bang on trend as ever. Though seriously, what does a Nicole Kidman night out in Ibiza even look like? ‘It’s a small dinner party or it’s a rave,’ she replies. ‘I’m either playing Scrabble or I’m out. It’s that simple,’ she says, and laughs again. What does the rave option entail? ‘Dinner at 10:30 p.m., club at 1 a.m. I’ll put on glasses. Sometimes I’ll wear a wig to hide, a little dark wig, and then I can just dance. As long as I’m surrounded by people—like, I take people with me—then I’m fine. I need it.’”

Just as Adéla needs to keep making Kidman film references, pivoting to an homage to 2004’s Birth with a scene of her carrying a birthday cake (though this one is shaped like two high-heeled shoes) and a scene of her in a bathtub. It’s around this time that she sings (in her Ariana style), “I pull up, step out/Get your pictures ‘cause I’m not gonna stay for long/I’ll say, ‘Hi’ (I’m gone)/Bye bye/Live vicariously through me, write my life like it’s a movie.” Adéla then takes some more creative license with her scene re-creations by writhing around in the birthday cake before going back to her Romy cosplay and licking milk from a saucer (a “trend” Madonna kind of started back in 1989 with the video for “Express Yourself”).

At the one-minute-fifty-four-second mark, the sound and image of a clapperboard gives Adéla pause to go out onto her balcony and read from the pink pages of a script while smoking a skinny cigarette. The brief “interlude,” of sorts, then leads to a montage of scenes in the settings that the viewer has already been exposed to thus far. Though she saves the grand “Satine on the swing” moment for more toward the end as Moulin Rouge dominates the majority of the “finale.”

However, the real pièce de résistance is Adéla rounding out the video with her take on Kidman’s illustrious AMC commercial (which first started playing in theaters in 2021), wherein she chooses to incorporate popcorn into her movie theater experience—something Kidman does not (perhaps it’s too gauche for her). She then lets the swing moment be the last scene as the clapperboard slams down and concludes her foray into Nicole Land. And, living out her screen queen fantasies, Adéla shows her own fans that even after you’re famous in your own right, being a fangirl doesn’t go away. Thus proving the old Us adage, “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!”