Just a few days after the Cannes Film Festival unveiled its 2012 slate, one competition title has already gotten an early P.R. push thanks to comments made by cast member Zac Efron and a few surprisingly risqué photos of his-costar, Nicole Kidman, in character. The film: The Paperboy, Lee Daniels’s follow-up to Precious, stars Matthew McConaughey and Efron as a pair of journalist brothers who investigate a Florida murder case involving a death-row inmate (John Cusack) in hopes of exonerating him. The brothers are enlisted by Nicole Kidman’s character, a woman who has fallen in love with Cusack’s inmate without ever meeting him. And judging by both Efron’s spoiler-y comments and the film’s racy stills—which show Kidman pouting, posing in a diaphanous negligee, and spreading her legs provocatively for the camera—her character is an unabashedly sexual creature who beds Efron on-screen.
