Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise met on the set of Days of Thunder in November 1989. They got married just over a year later, on Christmas Eve 1990. To an adoring, Entertainment Weekly-reading public, they were the platonic ideal of a celebrity couple: she won a Golden Globe for her performance in To Die For; he was the quintessential Movie Star; and they starred in a Stanley Kubrick film and adopted two kids. But considering what we know now about Cruise, this story was never going to have a Hollywood happy ending: they got divorced in 2001, and now Kidman (who later wed country star Keith Urban — Cruise’s relationships are more… complicated; the word “auditioned” is involved) says her marriage to Cruise was “protection” against sexual harassment.
“Being married to Tom Cruise at 22 is something I’m always reluctant to talk about, because I’m married now to the man who is my great love, and it almost feels disrespectful,” the Moulin Rogue star told New York‘s The Cut. “That said, I got married very young, but it definitely wasn’t power for me — it was protection. I married for love, but being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being sexually harassed. I would work, but I was still very much cocooned. So when I came out of it at 32, 33, it’s almost like I had to grow up.”
Kidman, who will soon appear in Aquaman and Destroyer (for which she’s receiving Oscars buzz), also revealed that she’s had “#MeToo moments,” but she declined to reveal the incidents. “Do they come out in my work? Absolutely. I’m open and raw. I want to have my well of experience and emotion tapped into, used — and I’m not just talking about sexual harassment,” she said. “I’m talking about loss, death, the full array of life. But it has to be by the right people so it’s not abused again.” You can read the rest of the interview here.
(Via The Cut)
