We always had Tom Cruise pegged as more of a trampoline guy.
Nicole Kidman has made rare public comments about her 11-year-marriage to Tom Cruise, reminiscing about the pair’s experience shooting 1999’s “Eyes Wide Shut” with iconic director Stanley Kubrick.
“You know how in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ you have that monologue in which your character is talking about infidelity,” David Marchese asked Kidman, 53, for an interview with The New York Times Magazine. “If you’re acting those scenes with the person to whom you’re married, and doing it as part of this immersive process, can it open up negative feelings that later you maybe wish you hadn’t opened?”
“That fits the narrative that people came up with, but I definitely didn’t see it like that,” Kidman responded.
“We were happily married through that,” she continued. “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.”
“Eyes Wide Shut,” which was Kubrick’s final film, notched a Guinness record for longest constant film shoot — 400 days — by the time it wrapped. Less than two years later, when Cruise, now 58, filed for divorce from Kidman in January 2001, fans pored over the film for insights into the couple’s relationship with each other and Kubrick. Not helping matters: Cruise and Kidman’s lawsuit against Star magazine over its allegation the couple hired a sex therapist for help with their performances in the film.
But “we loved working with [Kubrick],” Kidman said told Marchese. “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.
“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,” she acknowledged.
“Stanley, he wasn’t torturous,” Kidman continued. “He was arduous in that he would shoot a lot. But I’d sit on the floor of his office and talk, and we’d watch animal videos. He said animals were so much nicer than human beings. Though I do remember we were watching a wildlife thing where you saw the lion going after an antelope, and he could hardly watch it.”