The actress has talked about the eleven years she shared with the actor

Nicole Kidman denies that the movie 'Eyes Wide Shut' ended her marriage to Tom Cruise

Two years after Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise starred in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the actors and parents of two children ended their eleven-year marriage. Although the shadow of Scientology, to which Cruise is very close, has always hovered among the reasons for the separation, the marriage has also been accompanied by the legend that it was the harshness of filming that film, in which both had to emotionally assault each other in front of the camera, which led to the divorce.

Now, almost two decades later, Nicole Kidman has broken her silence. The interpreter from Australia has spoken for the first time about those years and has denied that Kubrick was the cause of the end of her marriage with Cruise.

“I understand that this fits with the narrative that the public has created seeing what happened next, but I definitely do not see it that way. Back then, Tom and I were happily married," Kidman told The New York Times about the film in which they played a married couple dealing with infidelity. “When we finished shooting those scenes, we would rent a go-kart track and go racing at three in the morning. I don't know what else to say about this. Maybe I can't look back and analyze them. Or maybe it's that I don't want to do it, ”she added.

Kubrick, who passed away at age 70 shortly after the controversial shoot, was a highly acclaimed director known for pushing his actors to their limits, tirelessly having them repeat scenes to perfection. It was even said that Tom Cruise filmed a scene up to 99 times and that he refused to do the 100th. However, Nicole Kidman has recalled that recording was a constant learning experience for her. “We worked with the best filmmaker and learned a lot about our lives. We enjoyed ourselves on the filming set. Why would we want it to end? Yes, we thought it was going to be three months of filming that later turned into two years. But in the end, you knew that as long as you gave yourself what they asked of you, you were going to have an incredible time.” “Stanley was not a torturer. He was tough because he liked to shoot a lot. But later I sat on the floor of his office and talked to him and we watched videos of animals together ”, she insisted on the controversial way of working that haunted the filmmaker until his death.

Nicole Kidman had barely spoken about her divorce from Tom Cruise. Yes, she had done it, on the other hand, from her marriage, which she acknowledged just two years ago that had saved her from some bullying situation in Hollywood. “I got married very young, but it was definitely not power for me, but protection. I married for love, but being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being S- harassed. I worked, but I was still very much in the chrysalis. So when I came out, at 32, 33, that's how I had to grow up," the actress said in an interview with New York Magazine in 2018. During their marriage, Kidman was always treated as "the wife of" and it wasn't until after her separation from Tom Cruise when the Australian interpreter began to fly alone and accepted several roles that would bring her the best reviews of her career such as The Others, by Alejandro Amenábar; Moulin Rouge!, under the orders of Baz Luhrmann or Las Horas, for which she got her first and to date only Oscar for playing Virginia Woolf.

Kidman and Cruise met in 1990, during the filming of the movie Days of Thunder, and separated in 2001. During their marriage, they adopted their two children, Connor, 25, and Isabella, 27. In addition, the actress has two other daughters with Keith Urban, whom she married in 2006, Sunday and Faith, aged 12 and 9, respectively. The Mission Impossible actor also has 14-year-old Suri, his daughter with Katie Holmes, whom he divorced in 2012.

Both Isabella and Connor are very low-key with their lives. They hardly let themselves be seen with their parents or in the media. Both belong to the Church of Scientology, like the actor. Bella lives precisely in London with her husband, Max Parker, whom she secretly married in 2015 at a wedding that none of her parents attended; in fact, Kidman met her daughter's husband in the summer of 2016. A graduate of London's Delmar Academy of Makeup and Hairstyling, she owns a fashion label she's named after her initials, BKC.

For her part, Connor lives in California with his girlfriend, a young Italian who is also part of Scientology. Although he played a couple of movie roles in his teens, he now lives apart and focuses on music and his church. In March 2019 it was learned that the young man was getting married and that they planned to leave Kidman out of the relationship, which his religion considers an enemy of the cause. During the time they were together and after their separation, Kidman and Cruise have always kept their children apart. “I am very secretive about them,” the actress told Who magazine in November 2018. “I have to protect that relationship. But what I do know 150% is that I would give up my life for my children. She also spoke then about the relationship of young people with Scientology: “They are adults. They are capable of making their own decisions. They have made the decision to be a Scientologist and as a mother, my job is to love them”, she said, admitting to being “an example of tolerance”.