Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, 1999. Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images
Nicole Kidman took a trip down memory lane while she recalled making Eyes Wide Shut with her then-husband, Tom Cruise.
During a Tuesday, July 16, interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kidman, 57, was asked if the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, was ever “mining” her real-life relationship with Cruise, 62, for inspiration.
“I suppose he was mining it,” she told the outlet. “There were ideas he was interested in. He’d ask a lot of questions. But he had a strong sense of the story he was telling. I do remember him saying, ‘Triangles are hard. You have to tread carefully when it’s a triangle.’ Because one person could feel ganged up on. But he was aware of that and knew how to manage us.”
Kidman clarified that she didn’t feel “ganged up on” while filming, but there was clearly a difference between Kubrick’s dynamic with her and Cruise. “There’s something about being a woman in that equation, too,” she said. “And Stanley liked women. He had a different relationship with Tom. They worked more closely together on his character.”
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Kidman recalled there being “a lot of talking” for one particular scene where she and Cruise’s characters shared a joint in their bedroom.
“When Tom and I first started with Stanley, it was at his home, and we didn’t even go over to the sets at Pinewood [Studios],” she explained. “Six, eight weeks passed, and we’re wondering, ‘Are we ever going to start?’ And we just wouldn’t start. We were getting comfortable with each other, comfortable enough to throw out ideas. For that scene, we improvised the beginning of it through the rehearsals.”
After filming for two years, Eyes Wide Shut premiered in 1999. Kubrick died before the movie’s release. While paying tribute to the legendary director in 2012, Kidman reflected on rumors that Eyes Wide Shut led to her and Cruise’s divorce.
“People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage — but I don’t really think it was,” Kidman wrote in an essay for The Hollywood Reporter at the time. “Tom and I were close then, and it was very much the three of us.”
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She continued, “Onscreen, the husband and wife are at odds, and Stanley wanted to use our marriage as a supposed reality. That was Stanley: He used the movie as provocation, pretending it was our sex life. Which we weren’t oblivious to, but obviously it wasn’t us. We both decided to dedicate ourselves to a great filmmaker and artist.”
Kidman and Cruise tied the knot in December 1990 after meeting earlier that year while filming Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder. The pair adopted kids Isabella and Connor in 1992 and 1995, respectively, before calling it quits in 2001. After a brief engagement to Lenny Kravitz in 2003, Kidman tied the knot with Keith Urban in 2006, and the pair share daughters Sunday Rose, 16, and Faith, 13.
