Twenty-five years after the release of the polarizing film, Eyes Wide Shut, Nicole Kidman is revealing just how much her real-life marriage to Tom Cruise played a role in the one she had depicted on screen.
In a new interview about the Stanley Kubrick drama for The Los Angeles Times, the Oscar winner reflected on whether the late director had "mined" her relationship with Cruise for the one between the movie's main characters, Bill and Alice Harford. The stars had been married for nearly five years and had adopted daughter Isabella and son Connor when they began filming for the movie in 1996. The two famously split in 2001, less than two years after the film premiered. Kubrick, meanwhile, unexpectedly died at age 70 four months before the movie was released.
"I suppose he was mining it. There were ideas he was interested in," Kidman told the Times. "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."
While it's been more than two decades since she and Cruise went their separate ways, the actress did share rare details about the time she spent with her ex-husband on the film, specifically behind the scenes in their shared trailer.
"We had a home 10 minutes away, but we lived in that trailer. Tom and I shared it because Stanley would say, 'You're not each getting a trailer. We can’t afford it,'" she recalled. "Tom had a smaller area because he was running stuff. And he'd play video games. That was when ['Minesweeper'] was big. So there was a lot of that."
Despite whatever challenging demands of the years-long project, the actress previously told The New York Times in 2020, "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."
Kidman has since gotten remarried to country star Keith Urban, with whom she's welcomed now-teenage daughters Sunday and Faith. But don't count on Eyes Wide Shut being an option for movie night at the Kidman-Urban home.
"Definitely not," she said of watching the movie with her kids. "At the AFI [Life Achievement Award] tribute, they saw the scene where I get stoned. They showed that and I was like, 'Ooooh. Golly. OK.' I sat next to my daughter, Sunday, watching that."
While the movie is out of the question, a public family appearance is not. In April, the girls made their long-awaited red carpet debut with their famous mom for the AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony, held in Kidman's honor.
While speaking to ET at the event, Kidman noted her daughters "are old enough now to be able to come and know what this is."
"To be able to do this with my family around me, I think gives it such balance," she added. "...It's very grounding."
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