Yahoo Finance Nicole Kidman Had a Rare Conversation About Her Ex-Husband Tom Cruise
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Nicole Kidman has made a point not to talk too much about her 11-year marriage to Tom Cruise, But, in a new interview with the New York Times Magazine, Kidman talked about her relationship with Cruise, particularly around the time that they were filming Eyes Wide Shut in the late '90s. And while there have been a lot of stories about their marriage—including gossip about that infamous post-divorce photo of Kidman—the actor says that she and Cruise’s relationship was just fine when they were working on the movie.
In the interview, Kidman was asked about whether filming Eyes Wide Shut, a psychological thriller about a married couple and infidelity, brought up negative feelings in her own marriage. “That fits the narrative that people came up with, but I definitely didn’t see it like that,” she responded.“We were happily married through that. We would go go-kart racing after those scenes. We’d rent out a place and go racing at 3 in the morning."
"I don’t know what else to say. Maybe I don’t have the ability to look back and dissect it. Or I’m not willing to.”
And while there has been plenty of talk about Kidman and Cruise’s relationship, there has also been a lot said about the filming of Eyes Wide Shut with director Stanley Kubrick. The shoot was 15 months long, it included a notoriously high number of takes for scenes, and Kubrick took advantage of the fact that Cruise and Kidman were married, doing things like telling them not to share directing notes with each other.
“We loved working with him,” Kidman clarified in the New York Times Magazine interview. “We shot that for two years. We had two kids and were living in a trailer on the lot primarily, making spaghetti because Stanley liked to eat with us sometimes. We were working with the greatest filmmaker and learning about our lives and enjoying our lives on set.” She added, “We would say, ‘When is it going to end?’ We went over there thinking it was going to be three months. It turned into a year, a year and a half. But you go, As long as I surrender to what this is, I’m going to have an incredible time.”
Cruise and Kidman divorced in 2001 and have two children together, Connor and Isabella, who are now both adults. In 2018, Kidman opened up about her relationship with Cruise in an as-told-to for The Cut in which she said being married to a powerful man like Cruise offered her some protection against being sexually harassed.
A post shared by Nicole Kidman (@nicolekidman) on Sep 18, 2020 at 8:31am PDT
In an interview soon after with the Today show, she spoke about her comments, but explained that she generally doesn’t “like discussing exes and all of that because I’m married.” She continued, “I’m very happily married. And I have two little girls. And I feel it’s almost disrespectful, one to Tom, and disrespectful to Keith [Urban, her husband], so I try to stay in the here and now.”
