Nicole Kidman makes rare comment about marriage to ex-husband Tom Cruise

Nicole Kidman made rare comments about her ex-husband Tom Cruise in a new interview.

The Oscar winner, 57, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the 25th anniversary of the former couple’s 1999 movie “Eyes Wide Shut,” written and directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Kidman was asked if she thought Kubrick “was mining” her marriage to Cruise, 62, to develop the relationship between their characters.

“I suppose he was mining it,” Kidman said.

“There were ideas he was interested in. He’d ask a lot of questions,” she continued. “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.”

“Eyes Wide Shut” follows a physician (Cruise) who infiltrates an underground sex group after learning his wife (Kidman) contemplated having an affair.

“There’s something about being a woman in that equation, too,” Kidman said in the interview. “And Stanley liked women. He had a different relationship with Tom. They worked more closely together on his character.”

Kidman recalled how the movie took two years to shoot, during which she and Cruise lived in a trailer and spent a lot of time with Kubrick, who died the year the movie was released, and their co-star Sydney Pollack.

“By the end, we’re learning how to make pasta because he’s a great cook, Sydney,” she said. “Stanley would come to our trailer, we’d eat. In the little kitchen in our trailer, Sydney would make this unbelievable artichoke pasta with [Parmigiano-]Reggiano and this incredible olive oil and roast chicken.”

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

Kidman and Cruise married nine years before “Eyes Wide Shut” was released.

They adopted two children together, Bella, 31, and Connor, 29. The pair got divorced in 2001 after 11 years of marriage.

In the LA Times interview, Kidman said that one of the two daughters she shares with husband Keith Urban caught a glimpse of “Eyes Wide Shut” at the 49th AFI Life Achievement Award Gala.

“She said, ‘Mom, that was good.’ She said, ‘That was really good,'” Kidman recalled of 16-year-old daughter Sunday’s reaction to the scene of the actress stoned.

“And I watched that scene and thought, ‘Wow. That was really good.’ And I never do that,” she added in the interview.

Kidman rarely talks about Cruise or the projects they did together.

But in Dave Karger’s 2024 book “50 Oscar Nights,” Kidman remembered “struggling” when she won the Academy Award for her role in “The Hours” in 2003 after finalizing her divorce from Cruise.

“I was struggling with things in my personal life, yet my professional life was going so well,” she said. “That’s what happens, right?”

Kidman said she went to the Vanity Fair Oscars after-party but “was completely overwhelmed, emotional, shaking, and I didn’t enjoy it.” She returned to her hotel alone and told herself she needed to find love again.

Two years later, she met Urban, 56, at a G’Day USA event. The sparks were immediate between the two, and they tied the knot in 2006.

Cruise, for his part, married Katie Holmes in 2006. Their daughter, Suri Cruise, was born that same year.

After six years of marriage, Holmes, 45, filed for divorce from Cruise in June 2012. The divorce was settled soon after.