Nicole Kidman: Why People Are Still Interested in My Marriage to Tom Cruise

Nicole Kidman adopted two children with Tom Cruise while they were married from 1990 to 2001 — get the details

Part of her past. Nicole Kidman doesn’t often speak about her divorce from Tom Cruise, but she isn’t bothered by the lasting interest.

The 54-year-old Big Little Lies alum admitted in the October 2021 cover story for Harper’s Bazaar that she isn’t annoyed by the continued fascination with her first marriage, which came to an end in 2001.

“I was young. I think I offered it up?” Kidman said in the interview, which was published online on Monday, September 20. “Maybe I’ve gotten a bit more trepidatious, but I’m always trying to be as open as possible. I just prefer to live in the world that way.”

The Nine Perfect Strangers star reflected on the struggle to keep her private life out of the public eye, adding, “I’m wary at times, and I’ve been hurt, but at the same time I much prefer a warm approach rather than a prickly shutdown approach. My husband, Keith [Urban], says that when he met me, he said, ‘How’s your heart?’ And I apparently responded, ‘Open.'”

Kidman met Cruise, now 59, in 1989 before they began working together on Days of Thunder, which hit theaters the following year. They tied the knot on Christmas Eve in 1990 and went on to adopt two children: daughter Isabella, now 28, and son Connor, now 26. The pair later costarred in 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut.

“We were happily married through that,” the Oscar winner told The New York Times in October 2020, reflecting on teaming up with her then-husband for the Stanley Kubrick project. “We would go go-kart racing after those scenes. We’d rent out a place and go racing at three in the morning. I don’t know what else to say. Maybe I don’t have the ability to look back and dissect it. Or I’m not willing to.”

The pair both “loved” learning from the late filmmaker, who died shortly before Eyes Wide Shut premiered. “We were working with the greatest filmmaker and learning about our lives and enjoying our lives on set,” Kidman told the outlet. “We would say, ‘When is it going to end?’ We went over there thinking it was going to be three months. It turned into a year, a year and a half. But you go, ‘As long as I surrender to what this is, I’m going to have an incredible time.'”

Cruise filed for divorce in February 2001 citing “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for their split. They were made legally single six months later.

Kidman previously opened up about feeling “reluctant” to discuss her romance with the Top Gun actor in a 2018 essay for New York Magazine.

“It almost feels disrespectful [to Keith],” she wrote at the time. “That said, I got married very young, but it definitely wasn’t power for me — it was protection. … When I came out of [the marriage] at 32, 33, it’s almost like I had to grow up.”

The two-time Emmy winner was briefly engaged to Lenny Kravitz in 2003 following her split from Cruise. She later married Urban, 53, in June 2006. They share daughters Sunday, 13, and Faith, 10.

Cruise, for his part, shares a 15-year-old daughter with ex-wife Katie Holmes.

Scroll down to see more from Kidman’s Harper’s Bazaar cover story: