When Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise were married from 1990 to 2001, they were one of Hollywood’s most talked-about couples. After all, they were two acting powerhouses in their own right that together made one hell of a power couple. So, of course, when the two starred opposite each other in Stanley Kubrick’s drama Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, fans of the couple couldn’t get enough.
Reflecting on her experience in the movie for its 25th anniversary, Kidman got candid recently about Kubrick’s process, and how her own love life inspired the story.
“I suppose he was mining [our marriage],” theA Family Affairstar said of the director to the Los Angeles Times. “There were ideas he was interested in. He’d ask a lot of questions.”
With that said, Kidman and Cruise’s story wasn’t the only jumping-off point he had. “He had a strong sense of the story he was telling,” Kidman said. “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.”
Luckily, Kidman never felt “ganged up on” in the process. “But there’s something about being a woman in that equation, too,” the Oscar winner reflected. “And Stanley liked women. He had a different relationship with Tom. They worked more closely together on his character.”
In the movie, Kidman and Cruise play married couple Dr. Bill Hartford and Alice who, after a sexual fantasy confession from Alice, become wrapped up in making their sexual fantasies come to life.
According to Kidman, who married country star Keith Urban five years after her 2001 split with Cruise, the biggest feature of hers she saw in Alice is her “boldness.” “I’m quite up-front and Alice becomes quite up-front, particularly when she was stoned … although that wasn’t me when I was stoned,” Kidman explained. “I was just naturally like that. Up-front.”
Talking about how the movie was filmed, Kidman admitted it was all tight-knit, from working in Kubrick’s home for weeks and sharing a trailer with Cruise. “We had a home 10 minutes away, but we lived in that trailer,” she remembered. “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,” she said. “And he’d play video games. That was when [“Minesweeper”] was big. So there was a lot of that.”
From the looks of it, Kidman and Cruise were just two actors following the genius of the late Kubrick’s work. Will we always see the movie as a glimpse into their relationship though? Absolutely!
Before you go, click here to see all the celebrity couples who met on set.
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