Watch Troye Sivan take Nicole Kidman clubbing with trans women and drag queens

Troye Sivan's first single from his next album, "She's the Best," is both a love song to a woman and a star-studded affair.

The title track, which dropped at midnight on Friday, includes a cameo from his close friend Charli xcx, and the accompanying music video for the song celebrates "the feminine," he said. It features Sivan alongside the Oscar-winning actress and fellow Aussie Nicole Kidman, season 15 RuPaul 's Drag Race winner Sasha Colby, and a bevy of other drag queens and trans women, young and old.

The song itself is what Rolling Stone called "an adoring portrait of an unnamed woman, with Sivan coolly narrating everything about her: her appearance, quirks, overall demeanor. Maybe they’re mundane observations to the average person, but to Sivan, every detail is magic."

The video, directed by Gordon Von Steiner, follows Kidman as she makes her way to a club filled with drag queens, including Colby. Kidman crosses through the dressing room and finds a seat at the bar as Sivan narrates from a variety of New York City locales: a coffee shop, a crowded bus, a ballet studio, and a shared apartment where couples are getting it on, inviting Sivan to join them.

Several scenes also include the iconic streets and subway train tracks of Long Island City and Sunnyside, Queens, as well as a brief visit to Manhattan's Chinatown, as the viewer is introduced to women who range in identities and orientations. He ultimately holds the spotlight at the club where Kidman sips a drink while watching him perform his sultry track.

"She’s the Best is a painting that captures my life in all of its moods and colours," Sivan said in a statement. "It explores the high-octane highs of the last few years, and the solitude and longing that sat underneath. It’s chaotic, layered, organic, troubled and alive. It feels like the truest and most creative version of myself I’ve ever shared. At some point along the way I realised – the only constant in my life keeping me somewhat sane has not been the work, or the men, but the feminine. Thank god for them."

As he sings, Kidman and Sivan exchange the kinds of looks that finally lead to an off-stage embrace, caress and then what will likely be the most talked-about scene: Sivan appears in drag alongside Kidman and other drag performers.

Sivan described the lyrics in the song as a collage of, and love letter inspired by, several women in his personal life, according to Rolling Stone. “To be able to have made music with Ariana [Grande] or Lily-Rose Depp, then touring with Charli [xcx] and growing up alongside her," he said. "I’ve always just loved being in the orbit of these women."

Charli xcx is heard only at the end of the single. "The vocal that you hear at the end of ‘She’s the Best,’ it’s Charli," Sivan told Rolling Stone. "We’ve found ways to work these women into the songs. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think for both George and I, Charli is obviously a very, very, very special person to both of us, and so to have her on that song in some small way is very meaningful to us," he said.

"'She's the Best' was the first time I wasn’t trying to psychoanalyze myself, and I wasn’t writing about men," he told Rolling Stone. "The one thing that has been constant in my whole life is the women in my life, and the feminine people in my life."

Sivan first met Kidman in 2018 on the set of the film Boy Erased — and where he first got her phone number. "She’s always just been such a picture of the divine feminine to me," he told Rolling Stone.

"I sent her the song, and I showed her some references for the video," he recalled. Later, during a Zoom call, he let an unknown number go unanswered: "I let it go to voicemail, and then I see the transcription starts coming, it’s like, ‘Hi darling Troye, it's Nic.' I slammed my laptop shut and just ended the meeting."

She's the Best is Sivan’s first album since 2023’s Something to Give Each Other, and arrives on Oct. 9. Watch the music video below.

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