Nicole Kidman and ex-husband Tom Cruise narrowly avoided each other at the Olympics just two weeks after she made a rare comment about working with him.
The Big Little Lies star, 57, attended the 2024 Olympics in Paris to watch the Women’s Gymnastics team final on Tuesday, July 30, with her husband, Keith Urban, and their daughters, Faith Margaret and Sunday Rose. The family sat in the crowd as they watched Team U.S.A. win gold.
The exes attended the Olympics just two weeks after Nicole reflected on what it was like working with Tom in their 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut. During an interview with the Los Angeles Times published on July 16, Nicole revealed if director Stanley Kubrick took inspiration from their real life romance for the film.
“I suppose he was mining it,” she answered. “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.’”
She added that “one person could feel ganged up on” due to her and Tom’s status as a married couple. “But he was aware of that and knew how to manage us,” Nicole said about Stanley, who died at the age of 70 in 1999.
Nicole also reflected on filming one specific scene with her ex in the psychological drama. “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 recalled. “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.”
She then explained that the scene evolved under the director’s guidance. “Just a lot of talking. 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]. Six, eight weeks passed, and we’re wondering, ‘Are we ever going to start?’ And we just wouldn’t start,” Nicole said. “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.”
Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise Narrowly Avoid Each Other Weeks After She Made Rare Comment About Him
Tom and Nicole married in 1990, and they adopted kids Isabella, 31, and Connor, 29, during their relationship. Their marriage wasn’t meant to be and they divorced after more than a decade together in 2001.
Nicole later found love when she wed Keith, 56, in 2006, while Tom was married to Katie Holmes from 2006 until 2012.
