Nicole Kidman Reminisced About Eating Spaghetti and Going Go-Kart Racing with Tom Cruise
Nicole Kidman, master of on-screen illusion, has surprised her fans once more.
The actress, who stars in HBO’s The Undoing out later this month, recently shared a candid conversation with The New York Times Magazine, opening up about her professional past as well as her relationship with ex-husband and co-star Tom Cruise.
In a rare instance, Kidman discussed the making of Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. The 1999 erotic thriller starred both Kidman and Cruise as a couple exploring the concept of infidelity.
Though production was supposed to wrap in just three months, Kidman said they ended up working on the film 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,” she told the outlet, referring to herself, Cruise, and their children Isabella, 27, and Connor, 25. “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?’” she recalled.
Given the nature of the film and the relationship at its core, the New York Times asked Kidman if shooting had released any “negative feelings that later you maybe wish you hadn’t opened?”
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“That fits the narrative that people came up with, but I definitely didn’t see it like that,” she replied. “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.”
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By 2001, Cruise and Kidman’s decade-long marriage had ended.
Neither party is exactly forthcoming when discussing the marriage or its demise, but Kidman did clarify in 2018 that marrying Cruise helped protect her from the sexual harassment that ran rampant in Hollywood during that time.
“I got married very young, but it definitely wasn't power for me — it was protection,” she wrote in an essay for New York Magazine. “I married for love, but being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being sexually harassed," she explained. "I would work, but I was still very much cocooned. So when I came out of it at 32, 33, it's almost like I had to grow up."
