Nicole Kidman opens up about making Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise

Nicole Kidman has given rare comments about her ex Tom Cruise, discussing their final film together, erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut.

Nicole Kidman has given rare comments about her ex-husband Tom Cruise, discussing the pair’s final film together, the 1999 erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut.

The film, legendary director Stanley Kubrick’s final project before his death, was released 25 years ago this week after a notoriously lengthy shoot – it held the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous film shoot at 400 days.

Anticipation was high for the film, starring real-life married A-listers Kidman and Cruise in roles very different to their previous movies together, 1990s Days of Thunder and 1992’s Far and Away.

Cruise played a New York physician who, shocked by his wife’s revelation that she’s thought about having an affair, embarks upon an extramarital adventure of his own, complete with secret societies and masked orgies.

Eyes Wide Shut was Stanley Kubrick’s final film, and Cruise and Kidman’s last project together before they split.

Two years after the film’s release, Cruise filed for divorce, and the pair have uttered few words about each other in public since.

But in a new interview with the Los Angeles Times for Eyes Wide Shut’s 25th anniversary, Kidman opens up about working with her then-husband on the gruelling shoot.

Columnist Glenn Whipp asked Kidman if she thought Kubrick was mining she and Cruise’s marriage to inform the couple they played in the film – a question Kidman gamely answered.

Cruise and Kidman stripped off for the film’s intimate scenes.

The film’s release was a media sensation.

“I suppose he was mining it. 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,” she said.

She revealed that she and Cruise had a home 10 minutes away from Pinewood Studios in London where the film was shot, but instead they largely stayed on set and “lived” in a trailer they both shared.

“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. And he’d play video games. That was when [Minesweeper] was big. So there was a lot of that.”

Cruise and Kidman at the film’s 1999 Sydney premiere. Picture: Jim Trifyllis.

She said that, while she and Cruise grew accustomed to Kubrick’s drawn-out working process, others who joined the project were in for a shock. At one point, actor-director Sydney Pollack joined the project in a supporting role. He arrived on-set estimating he’d be there for around three days – “And Tom and I just looked at each other, going, ‘Mmm-hmmm. Sure, Sydney,’” Kidman recalled.

And the Aussie actress revealed that one moment from the film took her by surprise when it was shown for the audience when she was honoured at the recent 49th AFI Life Achievement Award Gala.

The scene showed Kidman’s character stripped to her underwear and smoking marijuana. She said she was suddenly keenly aware she was sitting with her 16-year-old daughter, Sunday.

Sunday’s reaction to seeing a glimpse of one of her mother’s raciest roles? “She said, ‘Mum, that was good.’”

The film was to be Kubrick’s final work: He died of a heart attack aged 70 in March 1999, six days after showing his final cut of the movie to the studio.

‘It’s too much’: Star’s wild Eyes Wide Shut cameo

Scottish actor Alan Cumming had a small but pivotal role as a flirty hotel clerk in the film. He opened up about his scene-stealing cameo in a career-spanning 2021 interview with news.com.au:

You’re in the movie for all of three-and-a-half minutes – how long did that scene take to shoot?

Cumming's hotel clerk flirts wildly with Cruise's character.

That was like a week. Since then I’ve done lots of television, where if I was doing that scene nowadays, I’d be home by lunchtime. With Stanley, we did it for a week. I loved it though – it made me feel excited about acting again. He made every detail important, and I knew exactly why we were doing each take. You don’t usually get that – it’s, ‘That was perfect! One more!’ and you think, ‘Well if it was perfect, why are we doing another one?’

At the time I was a bit disillusioned with acting – if I hadn’t done that, maybe I would have stopped acting? Who knows?

Watching the scene on YouTube, there are a lot of questions from fans in the comments about whether that flirty subtext was in the script, or was something you brought to the role.

Oh my god, it was hardly subtext! There’s very little ‘underneath’ about it. That was in the script, and I was saying to Stanley, ‘Oh gosh, it’s too much. I’m going too far.’ ME saying that! I am not a subtle performer! But I was forced on to an even bigger performance and more lasciviousness.

And it was really interesting – at the time, there were all these rumours about Tom’s sexuality, so I think that’s why it was so sensational when it came out. Also, it was the only funny scene in the whole movie.