Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise are already history but the actress can still remember the times they had while filming their movie, Eyes Wide Shut.
The movie was released in 1999 and was the last film by Stanley Kubrick before he died. Kidman and Cruise played the role of a married couple and in 2001 they separated after 10 years of marriage. They also adopted two children named Isabella and Connor.
A decade after their separation, the two have moved on with their lives. Kidman married singer Keith Urban and had two daughters with him while Cruise married and divorced Katie Holmes with whom he shared a daughter.
During an interview with The New York Times, Kidman was asked about the impact of the roles they portrayed in their real life as husband and wife. Â Â
The interviewer asked, “You know how in Eyes Wide Shut you have that monologue in which your character is talking about infidelity and says to Tom’s character, ‘I was ready to give up everything’? That speech is all about emasculation and emotional aggression. 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?”
Kidman answered, “That fits the narrative that people came up with, but I definitely didn’t see it like that.”
“We were happily married through that,” she confirmed. “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.”
Kidman seldom talked about her past relationship with Cruise but she shared some behind the scenes moments when they were still working together with Kubrick. She assured that it wasn’t a bad time then.
She said, “This is where the fallacy is: We loved working with him. 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 revealed. “But you go, As long as I surrender to what this is, I’m going to have an incredible time. Stanley, he wasn’t torturous. 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. Interesting, isn’t it?”
