Nicole Kidman is giving something she almost never offers — some candid talk about her ex-husband Tom Cruise.
Specifically she’s talking about the inspiration for Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 thriller starring the then-Hollywood It couple turns 25 years old in a few weeks, and Nicole is reflecting on how her IRL marriage to Tom informed their onscreen dynamic. And considering that toxic dynamic in the movie… YEESH!
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While chatting with the Los Angeles Times this month, the 57-year-old revealed she believes the film’s director sought inspiration from her and Tom’s marriage for how their characters interacted in the film. She told the outlet:
“I suppose [Stanley] was mining it. There were ideas he was interested in. He’d ask a lot of questions.”
We mean, it makes sense. You don’t accidentally cast a married couple to play a married couple. 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.”
The movie is full of themes of unfulfilled desires, sexual fantasies, and jealousy. We wonder how much Stanley asked the superstar couple about that aspect of their marriage…
But there was, Nicole recalls, a big difference in how Stanley interacted with her as opposed to her then-husband:
“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.”
Hmm. On the one hand that seems unfair — on the other, Tom is in WAY more of the movie. He’s the one going on the psychosexual journey that’s haunted audiences for a quarter century now.
While Nicole and Tom divorced just two years after the film debuted, she told the New York Times in 2020 that they were “happily married” while shooting the movie. The exes share daughter Isabella, 31, and son Connor, 29, who were very young at the time. She explained then how the family stayed upbeat despite doing extremely caustic scenes:
“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 … 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.”
What are your thoughts on Nicole’s comments, Perezcious readers? Let us know in the comments down below.
[Images via Vanity Fair & Jimmy Kimmel Live/YouTube, & WENN]
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