Tom Cruise shielded Nicole Kidman from abuse
The ‘Big Little Lies’ actress spoke up about her 1990 marriage to Cruise at age 22
Nicole Kidman got “protection” from her marriage to Tom Cruise in the 1990s, she says — protection from the sexual harassment experienced by many of her Hollywood peers.
The Big Little Lies actress spoke up about her 1990 marriage to Cruise at age 22 in a Women and Power column written for New York magazine’s the Cut. Their 11 years together isn’t something she likes to talk about publicly, she said, out of respect for her marriage now to musician Keith Urban.
“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 said.
The marriage “definitely wasn’t power for me — it was protection,” she said.
But that protection didn’t shield her completely from the realities of being female.
“Of course I’ve had #MeToo moments — since I was little! But do I want to expose them in an article? No,” she said. “Do they come out in my work? Absolutely.”
And there is a lot of work coming.
Kidman’s next movie, Boy Erased, is due November 2, followed by the big-budget film Aquaman and the Karyn Kusama-directed project Destroyer, which will hit US theatres on December 21 and December 25, respectively.
Then in 2019, expect the return of Big Little Lies on HBO and the premiere of The Goldfinch, a film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Donna Tartt.