Nicole Kidman is commenting on her relationship with Tom Cruise 20 years after they split.
The Big Little Lies star, 54, rarely addresses her 11-year marriage to Cruise, which ended in 2001. Her comments come courtesy of an October 2021 cover story for Harper’s Bazaar.
When asked if she felt annoyed at how the press focused on her relationship with Cruise during their marriage, Kidman responded, “I was young. I think I offered it up?”
Kidman, who was 23 when she married Cruise, then 28, thinks she’s maintained an openness with the press despite the media coverage her marriage generated.
“Maybe I’ve gotten a bit more trepidatious, but I’m always trying to be as open as possible,” she said. “I just prefer to live in the world that way. I’m wary at times, and I’ve been hurt, but at the same time I much prefer a warm approach rather than a prickly shutdown approach. My husband, Keith, says that when he met me, he said, ‘How’s your heart?’ And I apparently responded, ‘Open.’”
Kidman and Cruise met at her audition for Days of Thunder in 1989, the first of three films they would star in together. They married six months after the film released in 1990, and went on to adopt two children, Isabella, now 27, and Connor, now 26.
In 1992, they starred in Ron Howard’s Western Far and Away. But their most high-profile film together would be Stanley Kubrick’s erotic drama Eyes Wide Shut in 1999. Some have speculated that the arduous two-year filming process, where she and Cruise played a troubled couple, contributed to their real-life split. But Kidman shot down that theory in a 2020 interview with The New York Times.
“We were happily married through that,” Kidman said of the emotionally aggressive scenes she had to film with Cruise. “We would go go-kart racing after those scenes. We’d rent out a place and go racing at three 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.”
Cruise filed for divorce in February 2001, citing “irreconcilable differences,” and received full custody of their children. Kidman reportedly did not see the divorce coming.
She went on to marry country singer Keith Urban in 2006, and shares two daughters with him: Sunday, 13, and Faith, 10.
Cruise also got married in 2006, to actress Katie Holmes. Ironically, Cruise reportedly did not see it coming when Holmes filed for divorce in 2012, citing “irreconciliable differences.” Holmes received full custody of their daughter Suri, now 15.