Nicole Kidman: Filming ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Didn’t End Her Marriage To Tom Cruise

Do you remember Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise costarring together in the late Stanley Kubrick’s erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut back in 1999?

It was a pretty intense movie that many thought could have contributed to the couple’s demise (they divorced in 2001 after almost 10 years of marriage), but Kidman has come out and said that’s just not the case.

The 45-year-old actress, who is now happily married to country singer Keith Urban, recently wrote for The Hollywood Reporter regarding her thoughts on the subject.

She says, “People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage — but I don’t really think it was. Tom and I were close then, and it was very much the three of us. Onscreen, the husband and wife are at odds, and Stanley wanted to use our marriage as a supposed reality. That was Stanley: He used the movie as provocation, pretending it was our sex life. Which we weren’t oblivious to, but obviously it wasn’t us. We both decided to dedicate ourselves to a great filmmaker and artist.”

Kidman also reveals that the sex scenes Kubrick asked for between her and Cruise were a bit intimidating at first for her, even if she admits her approach to the two-year film shoot was very “Zen.”

She writes, “Stanley had to coax me into some of the sexuality in the film in the beginning, but we shot things that were a lot more extreme that didn’t end up in the movie. I did feel safe — I never felt it was exploitive or unintelligent. He was very different with women than he was with men. He has daughters, so he was very paternal with me.”

There’s more to Kidman’s post and it’s a great piece really. It’s nice to hear from a celebrity who isn’t typically vocal about their personal lives. You can read the rest over at The Hollywood Reporter.