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99 In the final film from the director of The Shining, real-life '90s couple Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise left audiences wondering how much their relationship inspired their characters on screen.
It's been a minute since we've heard Nicole Kidman talk about her marriage and working with her ex-husband, Tom Cruise.
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The Los Angeles Times did a retrospective with Nicole discussing her marriage to Tom and their making of Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut.
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Stanley died four months before the film's release, and it starred two of the biggest stars and one of Hollywood's most famous couples at the time: Nicole and Tom.
The film, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, was based on the 1926 novella Dream Story and centered around themes of marriage and sexuality. So, it was pretty steamy to see the real-life Hollywood couple portraying the characters.
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In the LA Times interview, Nicole discussed whether Stanley "mined" her actual relationship for inspiration during filming. Surprisingly, this wasn't the first time Nicole and Tom had shared the silver screen.
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Nicole and Tom met while filming the 1990 Tony Scott film, Days of Thunder. Tom played a race car driver, and Nicole was a doctor and his love interest. The real-life '90s power couple were married in December of that same year.
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In 1992, the couple worked together again on Ron Howard's Far and Away. In the movie, they played Irish immigrants seeking their fortune during the Cherokee Strip Land Run of 1893.
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That same year, they adopted their daughter Isabella. In 1995, they adopted their son Connor, with whom Tom was recently seen together in a rare photo.
In 1999, Nicole and Tom starred in Eyes Wide Shut and divorced two years later in December 2001.
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On filming Eyes Wide Shut together (which famously took almost two years to complete), Nicole said, "When Tom and I first started with Stanley, it was at his home, and we didn't even go over to the sets at Pinewood [Studios]."
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"Six, eight weeks passed, and we're wondering, 'Are we ever going to start?' And we just wouldn't start. We were getting comfortable with each other, comfortable enough to throw out ideas. For that scene, we improvised the beginning of it through the rehearsals," she remembered.
"We had a home 10 minutes away, but we lived in that trailer. Tom and I shared it because Stanley would say, 'You're not each getting a trailer. We can't afford it,'" she said. "S had a smaller area because he was running stuff. And he'd play video games. That was when [Minesweeper] was big. So there was a lot of that."
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Elsewhere in the interview, Nicole discussed whether Stanley was drawing inspiration from her marriage to Tom. "I suppose he was mining it," Nicole said.
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"There were ideas he was interested in. He'd ask a lot of questions. 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."
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While Nicole never felt ganged up on, she found it interesting to be the only woman in the equation — filming with her husband and the seasoned director at the time.
Eyes Wide Shut, the celebrated director Stanley Kubrick's final film and now a cult classic, always had a special touch by including Tom and Nicole.
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It's remarkable that Tom and Nicole's three films together, more or less, mark the beginning, middle, and end of their relationship. So, it's refreshing to hear Nicole speak on that experience 25 years later.
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