Nicole Kidman made rare comments about her ex-husband, Tom Cruise, while reflecting on shooting 1999’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”
The Oscar-winning actress recalled working alongside her then-spouse while celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Stanley Kubrick film in an interview with the Los Angeles Times published Monday.
When asked whether the late director was taking inspiration from their marriage for the project, she replied, “I suppose he was mining it.”
“There were ideas [Kubrick] was interested in. He’d ask a lot of questions. But he had a strong sense of the story he was telling,” Kidman, 57, explained.
“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.”
The “Big Little Lies” star clarified that she never felt “ganged up on” because she and Cruise had very different relationships with the filmmaker.
“There’s something about being a woman in that equation, too. And Stanley liked women,” she said. “He had a different relationship with Tom. They worked more closely together on his character.”
Kidman also recalled sharing a trailer with Cruise because the budget wasn’t big enough for both of them to have their own.
“We had a home 10 minutes away, but we lived in that trailer,” she said. “Tom and I shared it because Stanley would say, ‘You’re not each getting a trailer. We can’t afford it.’”
She said that Cruise, 62, would often play video games like “Minesweeper” in their trailer in between filming.
Additionally, Kidman recalled spending weeks shooting one scene that eventually got cut.
“It was the scene with Tom and I where I start by smoking the spliff in bed and where I laugh and deliver the long monologue,” she shared.
“That took many weeks. A lot of that was rehearsing in the bedroom and then him not liking what we’d done. So we ended up reworking it, constructing it as we went along. There was no need to rush. Stanley would never go over budget. What he bought was time.”
The scene ultimately evolved through a lot of talks between Kidman, Cruise and Kubrick.
“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],” she said.
“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.”
The movie — which was Kubrick’s last before his death on March 7, 1999, at age 70 — follows the story of Dr. Bill Hartford (Cruise) becoming obsessed with the sexual fantasies of his wife, Alice (Kidman).
They explore an underground sexual group before Bill quickly discovers he’s in over his head.
Kidman and Cruise tied the knot nine years before the film’s release and adopted their two children, daughter Isabella and son Connor, in 1992 and 1995, respectively.
The exes divorced in 2001 and Kidman went on to marry Keith Urban, with whom she shares two daughters, in 2006.
Kidman has had a strained relationship with Isabella and Connor, who chose to follow their father and become Scientologists.
Meanwhile, Cruise was married to Katie Holmes from 2006 to 2012 and they share 18-year-old daughter Suri. Page Six reported in April that Cruise is currently estranged from the recent high school graduate.
