Nicole Kidman Felt Stanley Kubrick ‘Mined’ Her Marriage With Tom Cruise for Iconic Film

It has been 25 years since legendary director Stanley Kubrick's swansong Eyes Wide Shut was released. However, the lead actress of the film, Nicole Kidman, has not forgotten how the project seemingly caused irreversible damage to her and her then-husband Tom Cruise's marriage. The 57-year-old actress reflected on the process of making the film with Kubrick and Cruise as her co-star in a conversation with the Los Angeles Times, revealing intimate details that were not previously known to the public. 

“When Tom and I first started with Stanley, it was at his home, and we didn’t even go over to the sets at Pinewood Studios,” she told the outlet, referring to a scene where Cruise and Kidman have an intimate talk while smoking in their bedroom. “Six, eight weeks passed, and we’re wondering, ‘Are we ever going to start?’ And we just wouldn’t start. 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.”

When asked if Kubrick was using her real marriage to Cruise to drive forward the characters in the film, Kidman remarked, “I suppose he was mining it. There were ideas he was interested in. 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."

“But there’s something about being a woman in that equation, too. And Stanley liked women. He had a different relationship with Tom. They worked more closely together on his character.” she further clarified. For those who may not know, the high-profile former couple of Hollywood were married from 1990 to 2001; Kubrick filmed his final feature film between 1996 and 1998.

Later on, in a 2017 interview with Deadline, Kidman expressed how grateful she was to have a 'slightly zen approach to things' during the lengthy shoot of Eyes Wide Shut. “Because I was married and I had my kids there. It wasn’t like I was rushing to get finished, to get somewhere else. I was there, with Stanley, and I didn’t care. Whatever,” she told the outlet. Unfortunately, just a few days after the screening of the film's final cut, Kubrick passed away from a heart attack at the age of 70 on March 7, 1999.

In February 2001, Cruise filed for divorce from Kidman, citing irreconcilable differences as reported by US Weekly; in 2022, former Scientologist Mike Rinder made a scathing claim that the Scientology Church played an important role in separating the couple. According to the New York Post, when Kidman won the Academy Award for her role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, she could hardly hold back her tears. “I was struggling with things in my personal life, yet my professional life was going so well,” she told author Dave Karger in his book 50 Oscar Nights, referring to her split with Cruise.