Naomi Watts

She seduced King Kong Onscreen and Liev Schreiber in real life, but winning over Hollywood was harder. Now Naomi Watts, star of Dream House and J. Edgar, is focusing on her two young sons—and making “movies that I’d WANT to see.”

At first Naomi Watts balks when asked if she has a bawdy sense of humor, though bawdy is the exact word that three friends—actresses Nicole Kidman and Rebecca Rigg and writer-director Rodrigo García—each use when describing her ability to keep them in stitches.

“She’s bawdy as hell,” says Rigg, who shared a Bondi Beach apartment with Watts in Sydney, Australia, two decades ago. “She’s unshockable, and she’s shocking, especially to people who don’t know her.”

Watts, who stars in Dream House, opening September 30, and J. Edgar, due out November 9, still isn’t buying. “What exactly does bawdy mean?” she asks.

I punch up the definition on my laptop and read it to her: “dealing with sexual matters in a comical way; humorously indecent.”

She laughs. “That’s a bawdy sense of humor? I do, I do,” confesses Watts, 43. “And it’s definitely heightened when I’m in the company of Australian women and a drink.”

Perhaps that accounts for the night, recalled by Rigg, when Watts, after hours at a friend’s restaurant, climbed atop a table and launched into a risqué dance routine right out of the ’80s pop-music show Solid Gold...