Nicole Kidman makes RARE comment about working with ex Tom Cruise (2024)

Nicole Kidman rarely speaks about her time being married to Tom Cruise, but she made a rare departure recently while speaking about their work on Stanley Kubrick's classic film Eyes Wide Shut.

The 57-year-old Oscar winner — who was married to Cruise, 62, from 1990 to 2001 — detailed the relationship the married costars had with Kubrick while filming the dark drama in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

She opined that the director was 'mining' their marriage for material to flesh out the film, which premiered in 1999 and became a box office hit after grossing $162 million against a $65 million budget, according to Box Office Mojo.

The Top Gun star and the Big Little Lies actress spent years working on the film, which began production in 1996 and wrapped in 1998, before being released in the summer of 1999, giving it the record for the longest continuous film shoot at 400 days. Kubrick would die at age 70 just days after showing what was reportedly his final cut of the film to its stars.

Kidman — whose daughter Sunday had a surprising reactionto a scene in which she gets stoned in Eyes Wide Shut — described how the Clockwork Orange filmmaker would quiz her and Cruise about their marriage as he helped them shape their performances.

'There were ideas [Kubrick] was interested in. He’d ask a lot of questions. But he had a strong sense of the story he was telling,' she recalled.

'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,' she continued. 'But he was aware of that and knew how to manage us.'

Although she clarified that she never felt 'ganged up on,' she did admit that Kubrick treated his actors differently.

'There’s something about being a woman in that equation, too,' she explained. 'And Stanley liked women.

'He had a different relationship with Tom. They worked more closely together on his character,' Kidman said.

She added that she brought her 'boldness' to the character, though she clarified that her character's blunt statements in a scene in which she gets high was closer to her natural manner and not necessarily related to drugs.

While speaking about the scene, she recalled a portion of the larger sequence that they spent weeks filming, only for it to end up on the cutting room floor.

'It was the scene with Tom and I where I start by smoking the spliff in bed and where I laugh and deliver the long monologue,' she said.

'That took many weeks. A lot of that was rehearsing in the bedroom and then [Kubrick] not liking what we’d done. So we ended up reworking it, constructing it as we went along,' she shared. 'There was no need to rush. Stanley would never go over budget. What he bought was time.'

She added that the scene evolved through 'just a lot of talking' between the three principals.

The actress also noted that their work on the film began with meeting at Kubrick's home.

'We didn’t even go over to the sets at Pinewood [Studios],' she admitted.

'Six, eight weeks passed, and we’re wondering, "Are we ever going to start?" And we just wouldn’t start,' she recalled. '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.'

Then as now, Cruise and Kidman were two of the biggest stars on the planet, and their marriage only raised anticipation for Eyes Wide Shut.

But in order to afford the extraordinarily lengthy shooting schedule — which included plenty of time for the notorious perfectionist Kubrick to shoot countless takes of multiples scenes — the couple had to make sacrifices in service of the budget.

Instead of each getting their own trailer, as would have been customary for the stars of a major film, they were forced to share a single trailer on set.

'We had a home 10 minutes away, but we lived in that trailer,' Kidman recalled. 'Tom and I shared it because Stanley would say, "You’re not each getting a trailer. We can’t afford it."'

She added that her then-husband Cruise had a small area to himself in the trailer where he would often play video games, including Minesweeper, when they had free time between takes.

In Eyes Wide Shut, Cruise stars as Dr. Bill Hartford, whose marriage to his wife Alice (Kidman) hits a rough patch when he obsessively ruminates over a possible infidelity.

During a brief estrangement, he wanders the streets of New York City — despite the film being shot entirely in the UK — before finding himself enmeshed in the dark games of upper-crust elites.

The film famously includes a lengthy sequence in which Cruise's character gains entry to a ball for wealthy masked men to unleash their sexual fantasies, before he realizes that he's in great danger.

Kidman and Cruise share two adopted children from their marriage: Isabella, 31, and Connor, 29.

She later welcomed daughters Sunday, 16, and Faith, 13, with her husband Keith Urban, whom she married in 2006.

Cruise went on to marry the actress Katie Holmes from 2006 to 2012. They share one daughter, 18-year-old Suri, who reportedly has little connection to her famous father.