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Eyes Wide Shut

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Kubrick's intense study of the human psyche yields an impressive cinematic work.

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Stanley Kubrick

Dr. William Harford

Nicole Kidman

Alice Harford

Sydney Pollack

Victor Ziegler

Marie Richardson

Rade Serbedzija

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After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.

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• What Is Cinema?

Eyes Wide Shut at 15: Inside the Epic, Secretive Film Shoot that Pushed Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to Their Limits

By Amy Nicholson

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Kubrick’s obsession with secrecy so infected his cast and crew that no one has ever spoken about it in detail. The day-to-day life on set can only be inferred from facts and hints. The most major fact: Eyes Wide Shut was exhausting. Kubrick had asked Cruise and Kidman to commit to six months. When they landed in London in the fall of 1996, the couple fully expected to return to Hollywood by spring. Instead, they stayed on through the summer, fall, and another Christmas. Filming wrapped in January of 1998, but in May they were summoned back for more months of reshoots. Altogether they’d spend 15 months on Eyes Wide Shut, the Guinness World Record for the longest continual film shoot.

“Stanley had figured out a way to work in England for a fraction of what we pay here,” explained Sydney Pollack, who joined the cast as the corrosive tycoon Victor Ziegler after the extended shooting forced original actor Harvey Keitel to cry uncle and drop out. “While the rest of us poor bastards are able to get 16 weeks of filming for $70 million with a $20 million star, Stanley could get 45 weeks of shooting for $65 million.” Though every six months Cruise spent in London cost him another $20 million film he wasn’t making—plus he had the fledgling Cruise/Wagner production company to oversee—he swore to the press he had no qualms about his extended art house sabbatical.

“I remember talking to Stanley and I said, ‘Look, I don’t care how long it takes, but I have to know: are we going to finish in six months?’” said Cruise. “People were waiting and writers were waiting. I’d say, ‘Stanley, I don’t care—tell me it’s going to be two years.’”

Kubrick is legendary for his perfectionism—to reconstruct Greenwich Village in London, he sent a designer to New York to measure the exact width of the streets and the distance between newspaper vending machines. But his approach to character and performance was the opposite. Instead of knowing what he wanted on the set, he waited for the actors to seize upon it themselves. His process: repeated takes designed to break down the idea of performance altogether. The theory was that once his actors bottomed-out in exhaustion and forgot about the cameras, they could rebuild and discover something that neither he nor they expected. During The Shining, he’d put Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall through 50 takes to figure out what he wanted, causing Duvall to have a nervous breakdown. For Eyes Wide Shut, given his stars’ extreme pliancy and eagerness to please, Kubrick went further, once insisting that Cruise do 95 takes of walking through a door.

“In times when we couldn’t get it, it was just like, ‘Fuck!’” admitted Cruise. “I’d bring it upon myself because I demand a lot of myself.” But what he never asked—at least, not openly in the press—was if there was an “it” Kubrick wanted him to get. After all, a director who demands 95 takes could be exacting—or conversely, he could be ill-prepared and uncommunicative. Cruise’s overpreparation had served him well in the past. Not here. He got an ulcer, and tried to keep the news from Kubrick. At its core, the Cruise/Kubrick combination seems cruel: an over-achieving actor desperate to please a never-satisfied auteur. The power balance was firmly shifted to Kubrick, yet to his credit, Cruise has never complained.

Kubrick defenders—Cruise included—insist the legend was fully in command. “He was not indulgent,” Cruise insisted to the press. “You know you are not going to leave that shot until it’s right.” Yet it’s hard not to see indulgence when even small roles demanded prolonged commitment, like starlet Vinessa Shaw’s one-scene cameo as a prostitute, which was meant to take two weeks and ended up wasting two months. Adding to the peril, Kubrick also refused to screen dailies, a practice Cruise relied on. “Making a movie is like stabbing in the dark,” the actor explained. “If I get a sense of the overall picture, then I’m better for the film.” Cruise couldn’t watch and adjust his performance to find his character’s through line—a problem exacerbated by the amount of footage the director filmed. For most of the cast, who appeared only in one or two moments, they had only to match the timbre of their character’s big moment. But Cruise alone is in nearly every scene and had to spend the shoot playing a guessing game. Not knowing which of his mind-melting number of takes would wind up in the film, he still had to figure out how to shape a consistent character from scene to scene. Given Kubrick’s withholding direction and the exponential number of combinations that could be created from his raw footage, it’s understandable if the forever-prepared actor found himself adrift.

Adding to the actor’s peril was the part’s personal and emotional risk. Kubrick decided to find his story through psychoanalyzing his stars, prodding Cruise and Kidman to confess their fears about marriage and commitment to their director in conversations that the three vowed to keep secret. “Tom would hear things that he didn’t want to hear,” admitted Kidman. “It wasn’t like therapy, because you didn’t have anyone to say, ‘And how do you feel about that?’ It was honest, and brutally honest at times.” The line between reality and fiction was deliberately blurred. The couple slept in their characters’ bedroom, chose the colors of the curtains, strewed their clothes on the floor, and even left pocket change on the bedside table just as Cruise did at home.

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“As an actor, you set up: there’s reality, and there’s pretend,” explained Kidman. “And those lines get crossed, and it happens when you’re working with a director that allows that to happen. It’s a very exciting thing to happen; it’s a very dangerous thing to happen.” Added Cruise, “I wanted this to work, but you’re playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up.” At least the two actors had an auditory cue to distinguish fact from fiction: on camera, Kidman changed her Australian accent to American. But there was also external tension pressing down on their performances as both actors—especially Cruise—were media savvy enough to recognize that audiences would project Bill and Alice’s unhappiness on their own marriage, which was already a source of tabloid fodder. Even during the course of filming, the couple had to successfully sue Star magazine for writing that they hired sex therapists to coach them.

Kubrick’s on-set wall of secrecy even divided Cruise and Kidman. To exaggerate the distrust between their fictional husband and wife, Kubrick would direct each actor separately and forbid them to share notes. In one painful example, for just one minute of final footage where Alice makes love to a handsome naval officer—an imaginary affair that haunts Bill over the course of the film—Kubrick demanded that Kidman shoot six days of naked sex scenes with a male model. Not only did he ask the pair to pose in over 50 erotic positions, he banned Cruise from the set and forbade Kidman to assuage her husband’s tension by telling him what happened during the shoot.

Co-star Vinessa Shaw would eventually admit Kubrick had exhausted the once-indefatigable actor, confessing that compared to Cruise’s “gung ho” first months of shooting, by the end, “He was still into it, but not as energetic.” Still, when gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote that the Eyes Wide Shut set was miserable, Cruise quickly fired back a letter insisting that his and Kidman’s relationship with Kubrick was “impeccable and extraordinary. […] Both Nic and I love him.” Added actor and director Todd Field, on set for six months to play the pivotal role of the piano player Nick Nightingale, “You’ve never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director.” However, Cruise’s devotion to Kubrick’s massive mystery masterpiece would prove damaging to his screen image.

Good vs. Right

It’s hard to love Cruise’s character, Dr. Bill Harford. He’s closed off and slippery, a cipher whose choices don’t make consistent sense. What personal history screenwriter Frederic Raphael had included in the original drafts—Harford’s strained relationship with his father, his guilt over his prurient interest in female anatomy—Kubrick had purged from the script, leaving Cruise to play a shallow voyager who only serves to lead the audience on an odyssey of sexual temptation. Also on the page but deleted from the final film is Bill’s explanatory voice-over that invited the audience to understand his feelings. Worse, Kubrick deliberately shunned including the Tom Cruise charisma fans expected in his performance, raising the question of why he cast Cruise at all. Why ask the biggest star in the world to carry your film and then hide his face under a mask for 20 minutes?

Though this is a story of sexual frustration—an emotion Cruise had played with conviction in Born on the Fourth of July —and jealousy, which is just the darker twin of Cruise’s signature competitive streak, his performance in Eyes Wide Shut feels flat. He’d done vulnerability better in Jerry Maguire and had captured neutered paralysis a decade and a half before in Risky Business. Yet in nearly all of Eyes Wide Shut ’s key emotional moments—his wife confessing to her first and second psychological “betrayals,” his patient’s daughter professing her love over her father’s corpse, nearly kissing a call girl’s corpse in the morgue, being unmasked at the orgy—Cruise’s face is stiff and visibly unfeeling, almost as if he never took the mask off at all.

Cruise’s blankness makes Eyes Wide Shut take on an element of kabuki theater, the art form where emotional perception—not projection—is key. The whole film feels like an exercise in theatricality, as though Dr. Bill is not a person but a prop. This isn’t a movie about a human possessed with distrust and jealousy—it’s a movie about distrust and jealousy that simply uses a human as its conduit. With Cruise hidden in a mask and robe, the intention is to hide his individuality in the service of a larger ritualistic machine. Even in his scene with the impossibly sweet prostitute played by Vinessa Shaw, their conversation about how much cash for which physical acts doesn’t spark with lust but limps along like the characters themselves are merely performers recognizing that this is the negotiation that is supposed to take place. “Do you suppose we should talk about money?” he asks—it’s as if their whole conversation is in air quotes.

To critique Tom Cruise’s performance in Eyes Wide Shut, it’s important to distinguish between good and right. Measured against any of his previous screen roles, his acting reads as terrible. It’s artificial, distant, and unrelatable. However, the terribleness of his performance translates into a tricky logic puzzle. On-screen, we’re given only one take of the 95 attempts that Cruise shot. If Kubrick was a perfectionist who demanded Cruise repeat himself 95 times on the set, and in the editing room rejected 94 of those takes, then the “terrible” take Kubrick chose must be the take that Kubrick wanted. What feels flat to the audience must have felt correct to the director, so even though it’s hard to appreciate Cruise’s performance, at least one person must have thought the chosen take was perfect: Stanley Kubrick. And for Cruise, a perfectionist himself who was determined to make his master happy, we’re forced to defend the “badness” of his performance by recognizing him as an excellent soldier following orders.

Yet critics under the sway of thinking that the great Kubrick could do no wrong and Cruise, the popcorn hero, could do little right, blamed the actor for the director’s choices and groaned that “Our forever boyish star just can’t deliver.” The irony, however, is that in 45 years of filmmaking, Kubrick had never asked his actors to deliver. His films had earned Oscar nominations for their acting only twice: Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Peter Ustinov in Spartacus (1960). In his much shorter career, Cruise himself had earned as many Oscar nods. That fact alone speaks to the limited value the director placed on acting—to Kubrick, his cast was merely a tool for his vision and individual performances subservient to his intimidating authorial style. Kubrick’s disinterest in actors is evident even in *Eyes Wide Shut’*s credits, which despite including two directors (Pollack and Field) and two great character actors (Alan Cumming and Rade Serbedzija) filled the rest of its cast with new faces and 10th-billed TV actors. As much as Cruise wanted Eyes Wide Shut to prove, yet again, that he could act, Kubrick clearly had scant interest in giving him the opportunity.

Cruise made himself vulnerable before Kubrick and his devotees, but instead of being rewarded for his emotional and financial sacrifice, audiences dismissed his performance as callow. He couldn’t even ask his by-then dead-and-buried director for support. Eyes Wide Shut ’s fallout wasn’t flattering: he was blamed for the film’s failure, and the tabloids took a savage interest in his marriage, which would last only two more years. Yet Cruise continues to defend his two years of hard work. “I didn’t like playing Dr. Bill. I didn’t like him. It was unpleasant,” admitted Cruise a year later in the only public criticism he’s ever given. “But I would have absolutely kicked myself if I hadn’t done this.”

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• Make the Case: ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Is Actually a Comedy, and the Best Film of 1999

Throughout the week, The Ringer will celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of the best years in movie history and argue why some films deserve to be called the best of ’99. Here, two of our writers make the case for Stanley Kubrick’s psychosexual portrait of a marriage.

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Welcome to 1999 Movies Week, a celebration of one of the best years in film history. Throughout the week, The Ringer will highlight some of the year’s best, most interesting films, and in this series, make the case for why a specific movie deserves to be called that year’s best. Here, Manuela Lazic and Adam Nayman discuss the final film of Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut.

Adam Nayman: In thinking about how we could make the case that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was—and remains—the best movie of 1999 (a very good year for movies, according to our Ringer colleagues and pretty much everybody else), I thought it’d be good to start somewhere a bit unexpected: with just how funny it is. I know that saying “[Weird Movie X] is actually a comedy” to make other people feel bad for not getting it is an annoying move. But Eyes Wide Shut is laugh-out-loud hilarious, on purpose. I was 18 years old when it came out, and I have vivid memories of it being treated as a pop-cultural punch line—as something to make fun of.

I understand why this happened: it’s a strange, arty, deliberately stylized movie that uses dream logic to address challenging themes of love, commitment, male vanity, and the fear of death; it speaks the language of symbolism and metaphor; Kubrick’s death earlier that year meant it carried a lot of pressure as his last will and testament; it has a lot of topless women. And, for the only time in Kubrick’s career, he worked with movie stars who were more famous than he was. The media scrutiny on Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s troubled marriage, and whether spending a grueling 400 days on a movie set shooting a drama about jealousy and infidelity damaged it further, predictably reframed the conversation about the film around celebrity, instead of cinema. Even more predictable was the way that critics of all kinds acted like horny teenagers—or accused Kubrick of being a horny teenager—when the movie premiered.

“Now we get the fucking laughing fit, right?” snaps Cruise’s Bill Harford during an early, pot-fueled argument with Kidman’s Alice, and I wish I could just play that clip every time I read or hear somebody say that Eyes Wide Shut is a movie to laugh at. It’s a movie to laugh with , and the scene where Cruise and Kidman get tetchy with each other in their underwear is Exhibit A. Alice’s case of the giggles is in response to her husband’s statement that she would “never be unfaithful to him,” an idea that she goes on to demolish over the course of an amazing, five-minute monologue that serves as the true beginning of the movie’s story and that sets “Dr. Bill” off on a series of nighttime adventures fueled by paranoid jealousy.

The comedy starts with the opening shot, which holds on Alice’s naked, statuesque body just long enough for us to get an eyeful before cutting away. Right off the top, Kubrick establishes a comic rhythm of interruption. (Another example: The stately Shostakovich waltz that plays over the credits is revealed as emanating from the Harfords’ own stereo—I don’t know why, but the shot of Cruise turning the music off strikes me as something out of Mel Brooks). These are little, witty touches; for a more spectacular example, check out the way that Kubrick and cinematographer Larry Smith turn the argument between Bill and Alice into a sophisticated sight gag. By the end, Alice is doubled over with laughter, at which point the film’s elegant Steadicam perspective gets supplanted by a bobbing, handheld camera—the image becoming destabilized right along with our (anti?)hero’s self-confidence as a husband, lover, and master-of-the-universe alpha male. After all, the larger joke about Eyes Wide Shut is that it’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie in which Tom Cruise can’t get laid (Maverick and Jerry Maguire didn’t have that problem). We’re going to have to talk at some point about whether or not Eyes Wide Shut is a movie about men—Stanley Kubrick included—gawking at women, but can we start by discussing how it is also, in a very serious way, a movie about women laughing at men? Or are you going to make fun of me for even suggesting such a thing?

Manuela Lazic: I will, in fact, laugh at you for suggesting this, but not because I disagree, and not with a full-hearted laugh. Imagine I’m doing something a little sadder—a little like Alice’s own laugh at her husband, perhaps—because of course women have to laugh at men in Eyes Wide Shut. But that’s never all they do. Alice has to get stoned before she can laugh in her husband’s face with so much frame-shattering, camera-disorienting abandon. Because if Eyes Wide Shut really is about men, it is also, more specifically and as you said, about how men perceive women—and there’s nothing really funny about that. Rewatching that pot-smoking scene, I was struck by how angry, sad, and exposed Alice gets when she starts to giggle.

While the pot helps her to open up, laughter functions here (as it often does) like a self-defense mechanism for Alice to protect herself from feeling as upset as she should. Earlier in the film, she has a similar interaction with the suave Hungarian stranger who tries to get her into bed at Victor Ziegler’s Christmas party. Here again, she is wasted (this time on champagne). Alcohol and drugs get Alice to both reveal herself and peel away at the arrogance of the men around her, which perplexes both Bill and the stranger. She may remain silent during most of the Hungarian’s talk, but she is smiling at his terrible double entendres the entire time, and ultimately leaves him hanging.

As a woman who has suffered through such eye-roll-inducing talk from men, I was astonished by Alice’s decision to take this attempted seduction with a smile. But Alice’s approach isn’t testimony to Kubrick writing this character through a male misogynistic lens. On the contrary, it is the presentation of one of the few options that women have when confronted with the ludicrous vanity of men (my reaction would have been overt anger, disdain, and immediate flight).

When Alice is faced with this behavior again, this time from her husband, the smile she offered the Hungarian turns into full-blown laughter, before she explains with literally sobering seriousness what lies behind the smile. It’s a simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking moment because Alice really wishes Bill could understand that she, too, has desires.

For me, the funniest sections of Eyes Wide Shut are those when Bill is seen reflecting on his discovery of female desire, often when he’s in his car and Kubrick’s camera zooms in on his terrified eyes. In this alone time, he finally gets to explore his interiority and use his imagination (in other words, he gets to think!) instead of “acting” in and on the world. He is clearly disturbed by this new exercise. Alice, by contrast, is used to questioning her thoughts (like when she developed an intense crush on a naval officer during a family holiday, and couldn’t decide whether she wanted him to leave their hotel or take her away) and exploring the world through dreams. In fact, Bill’s deep dive into an underworld of performative sex, and life-threatening curiosity on the streets of New York and outside the city, is clearly paralleled by Alice’s abstract but not so unintelligible dreams: Unlike her husband, who has to physically move through space to find himself in situations that challenge his beliefs, Alice uses her brains to confront the truth about her perfect-seeming marriage.

I love this idea, and I love how Kubrick deploys it through this masterpiece. He manages to show how women’s need to rely on their interiority to live in the world is at once a blessing and a terrible example of inequality between the sexes. Right after Alice tells him about her longing for that naval officer, Dr. Bill receives a call and has to go to the bedside of a patient who just died. There, he meets the man’s daughter, Marion, who suddenly tells Bill that she loves him and that she doesn’t want to move to Chicago with her soon-to-be husband. Bill has been the love of her life all along. The moment is both hilarious and terrifying, thanks in great part to Marie Richardson’s explosively emotional performance as Marion, but also because of how this scene has been contextualized by Alice’s monologue (and because Richardson has been styled to look a bit like Kidman).

Kubrick, in his usual ironic, on-the-nose way, has followed Alice’s tale of overwhelming desire with an example of that very feeling in the person of Marion, for Bill to directly experience it himself. Here, he is the naval officer, and Marion is Alice: With her thoughts alone (“Marion, we barely know each other,” says Bill, needlessly), Marion has already built a relationship with the object of her desire. The scene becomes simultaneously funnier and more heartbreaking when Marion’s fiancé shows up and Bill says goodbye, leaving Marion to her fate as a wife and a misunderstood and desirous person—just like Alice has become.

Another undeniably funny thing about Eyes Wide Shut is its style. Each crossfade feels a little off but in a Kubrickian way—they have a calculated tonal significance, meant (I think!) to highlight the artificiality of the world Bill evolves in. The camera’s fluidity recalls The Shining ’s long tracking shots in the deserted hotel of Jack Torrance’s mind. Yet Eyes Wide Shut is much weirder than The Shining (yes, such a thing seems possible to me): The obviously fake New York streets! The Wu-Tang Clan reference! The Chris Isaak song! Do you agree that this film is strangely clunky? And do you think it is clunky for good reason, beyond the difficult shoot? What makes this stiffness compelling? And do you think this film’s style has been influential?

Nayman: I’m going to have to go to the judges on those Wu-Tang references; according to the internet, Eyes Wide Shut is actually Illuminati propaganda filled with subliminal imagery. I would, of course, happily watch a Room 237 –style essay about Eyes Wide Shut ’s hidden messages, except that there probably isn’t quite enough ambiguity in the film to support it. I like that you called Kubrick’s irony “on-the-nose,” because it is, which doesn’t mean that it isn’t also suggestive and complicated (as you have already described in the scene with Marion, although you left out the part about Marion’s fiancé being a visual doppelgänger for Bill, played by Thomas Gibson, which means there’s one degree of separation between one of the best American films of the ’90s and Dharma & Greg ).

As for style, I think it’s more that Eyes Wide Shut extends and refines techniques and motifs dating back to its director’s earliest work; it’s almost like a greatest hits album. For instance, that late shot of Alice, fast asleep with the mask on the pillow beside her, is a direct reference to a shot from Kubrick’s (excellent) sophomore feature, Killer’s Kiss . That movie is also evoked by the presence of those creepy mannequins in the sex shop where Leelee Sobieski appears as a 21st-century version of Lolita , right before Bill goes to the mansion that looks like the Overlook Hotel ... but I’d better stop before this turns into Room 237 II after all.

I’d agree that Eyes Wide Shut is aggressively artificial, and that the phoniness of its Manhattan setting is crucial: to quote that other modern deconstructed-rom-com masterpiece They Came Together , it’s like New York City is a character in the movie—a weirdly untrustworthy one. Kubrick’s carefully color-coded version of the world’s most photographed city—all of those blue filters and all the Klimt-style gold at the edge of the frame—is not just a case of aesthetic flexing but a cue to understand that we’re somewhere between the literal and the figurative. Eyes Wide Shut is not interested in building up a sense of everyday reality; its architecture is the rickety constructions of the subconscious.

The German title of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle , on which Eyes Wide Shut is based, translates to “A Dream Story,” and it’s that slightly tranced-out quality—of events experienced with “eyes wide shut”—that I think Kubrick finally perfected here after deploying it more sparingly in his earlier movies. The tracking shots in The Shining (and Full Metal Jacket ) are hypnotic, but in Eyes Wide Shut , the effect of all that serene, gliding camera movement is to submerge the viewer in layers of aspirational fantasy. Bill and Alice’s high-rolling life is a dream, and then, as we discover, there are even deeper layers underneath, both in terms of what the characters desire and also the topography of their New York. One hint to what the movie is doing as far as dreaming goes, lies in the—again, quite hilarious—way that Bill, for all his wealth and social status, moves through the movie as an almost completely passive figure, especially after the revelation of Alice’s imagined infidelity. In almost every scene, he ends up repeating or parroting the dialogue of other characters, as if he has no ideas of his own.

I truly love Cruise’s performance, and I think that it makes for an interesting contrast with his Oscar-nominated work the same year in Magnolia. There, as Frank “T.J.” Mackey, Cruise weaponized his clean-cut, sex-symbol status to play a guy peddling penis worship (“ respect the cock ”) to a millennial-incel audience. As Magnolia went on, we saw the scared, grieving little boy inside the persona. In Eyes Wide Shut , Cruise’s characterization is less sentimental, because Bill isn’t psychologically damaged or in need of redemption. He’s a cipher, and considering the significance of masks in the movie’s design—with the selection of Venetian masks in particular evoking a long history of literary and theatrical eroticism—the way that Kubrick uses Cruise’s flawless visage as a mask for Bill’s insecurity and lack of imagination is ingenious.

Obviously, in a movie filled with double entendres and body doubles, the infamous secret-society sequence with the guests all decked out in masks is meant to parallel Victor Ziegler’s Christmas party, with the difference being that Bill goes to the latter alone, as a bachelor. I don’t know if you want to talk about what goes on the mansion, but if Eyes Wide Shut is a “dream story” what does it mean that a 20-minute sequence set at an orgy plays out like such an absurd and embarrassing nightmare?

Lazic: One cannot talk about Tom Cruise without bringing up the idea of masks and disguise—and, tangentially, the realm of dreams. As you say, Kubrick uses Cruise’s perfect face as a veil in and of itself, and therefore a signifier of falseness: There’s nothing perfect lying beneath his perfect features. This is similar to how the actor’s visage was employed three years prior by Brian De Palma, the master of the body double himself, in the first Mission: Impossible film. There, Cruise used masks to deceive his traitors and alter reality. But of course, the most existentially disturbing mask that Cruise ever wore was the facial prosthetic his character David Aames was offered after his accident in Cameron Crowe’s 2001 psychological epic Vanilla Sky —or was he? “It’s only a mask if you treat it that way,” says one of the doctors, but David can no longer pretend that this smooth, consistent, standard face is his.

Just as this disappointing substitute for a face takes David into a nightmarish version of his life in which he is not handsome and doesn’t get the girl, Dr. Bill’s Venetian mask transports him to a dark place where other people, as you say, keep their protective camouflage and force him to show his real face, humiliating him.

This scene in the mansion is so deliciously cringe-worthy because it is such an overblown, tongue-in-cheek yet disturbing abstraction of what Bill is experiencing out in the world, after he finds out about female desire. His experience at this sordid party is a grotesque, dreamlike copy of his aborted adventure with Domino (also the name of a type of Venetian mask, of course!), a sex worker played by Vinessa Shaw who picks him up, takes him to her place, has to decide herself what she will do for him, and eventually can’t even get to it because he soon chickens out. She even feels too sorry for Bill to want his money. Just like he stands on the outside looking in at orgies at the secret gathering, Bill can’t participate in this superficial sexual masquerade with Domino. He’s too aware of his own pretense and of this woman’s selfhood. Kubrick makes Bill’s discomfort in Domino’s tiny room just as crushing as his shame when the cloaked cult unmasks him, because they are essentially the same sensations.

After his wild—or anti-climactic, considering he only got to have a look at things—night at the mansion, Bill searches for answers in Ziegler, his boss, played by Sydney Pollack. Their small talk when Bill enters his superior’s expensive office is as absurd as it gets, until Ziegler snaps: He comes clean to Bill, explaining that he too was at the secret meeting, but also, and more importantly, that the shaming ceremony that Bill was subjected to, including the suggested sacrifice of a woman for his sake, was “all staged to scare the shit out of [him].”

At last, the masks finally come down, and casting Pollack as Ziegler proves perfect. With his hyper-naturalistic acting style and gregarious manner, the legendary actor-director is the polar opposite of Cruise’s ideal looks—it is no coincidence that, from very early on in the film, Ziegler reveals his drug-fueled sexual activities to Bill. In this film, Pollack’s down-to-earth appearance is aligned with Ziegler’s bone-chilling honesty. Again, Kubrick parallels this scene with another one, set out in the world: Bill goes looking for Domino, but instead of finding her at her apartment, he meets her roommate, who kills the explicit sexual tension between them by announcing that Domino has been diagnosed with HIV. Did Domino really have the virus? Did she even exist? Although Bill didn’t end up having sex with her, he shivers when he learns how close he came to danger, and the entire chapter feels like a Fatal Attraction –esque cautionary tale about what men do to prove their masculine prowess to themselves. With Ziegler and Domino, Bill is twice denounced for trying to keep on the mask of male sexual vanity and control.

I love that scene with Pollack because it feels like Kubrick revealing his tricks in the clearest, most direct way he ever has. What follows is one of the most astounding, delectable, and moving displays of discomfiting a man I’ve ever seen in cinema (in the same category, see Phantom Thread and most other Paul Thomas Anderson movies). That’s what is truly funny to me: how weepy Bill gets when he sees the mask on his pillow, and how Cruise says “I’ll tell you everythiiiiiiing”!

How do you think this character arc fits in Kubrick’s filmography? Do you think Bill has really gotten the message by the end, or is Kubrick again being sarcastic about Bill’s newfound willingness to understand his wife? I find that the Barbie doll that their daughter Helena picks up at the toy store in the last scene, interrupting their conversation, may be a sign of things to come for her, and for women in general …

Nayman: I think “I’ll tell you everything” is funny too, although the hard cut to Kidman’s face the morning after—with those dreamy blue filters swapped out for some harsh natural light—is probably the most emotional moment in the movie for me, the one where the script, the actors, and the filmmaking combine to allow for authentic fragility amid the satire and sarcasm, and to address the “real” transgressions that have been coded into Bill’s adventures. I refuse to offer a definitive interpretation of whether or not Bill did a “bad, bad thing” either during Eyes Wide Shut ’s duration or at some other point in his marriage to Alice; the point is how we see him given every opportunity to do so and failing mostly because of external circumstances rather than any moral imperative (again, this is a movie in which Tom Cruise definitively fails to get laid).

The scene where Bill visits the morgue and sees the corpse of the woman who “saved” him during Ziegler’s orgy—gazing at her as she lies naked on the slab, her body exposed and her eyes wide shut—anticipates the morbid cruelty of Pollack’s monologue, which is all about concealing the truth, about the seduction of repression. It’s also, quite literally, about staring death in the face. That’s why when we see Bill reading a copy of the New York Post with the big-type headline “LUCKY TO BE ALIVE” (an image that used to be my Twitter avatar), it plays, like so much of Kubrick at his best, two ways: it’s a grim sight gag that also hints at the mind-set Bill is about to bring home with him as a husband and father.

Dr. Bill’s newfound willingness to communicate with his wife is sincere, and as a result, it’s funny: the two things don’t cancel each other out but instead are heightened in tandem. In the scene in the Macy’s, he insists on using a very particular “F-word” to suggest a solution to their marital impasse—“forever.” This is a significant idea given the context of Kubrick’s career: a lusting for immortality (for some kind of “forever”) is always tied to male protagonists in his films, whether it’s Barry Lyndon yearning for an aristocratic title that he can pass on to his son, or Jack Torrance in The Shining telling his son he wants to stay at the Overlook “forever and ever and ever” (presumably all by himself, after he’s done butchering his wife and son). In sharp contrast to his attitude in the early scenes, where he took both Alice and her fidelity for granted, Bill now clings to the renewed promise of enduring domestic bliss. Alice, though, counters with an F-word of her own, offering a more provisional solution to the problem at hand—and getting the last dirty word in Kubrick’s entire career. In the end, Alice wants exactly the same thing as her husband, and in giving him a piece of her mind, she rescues Eyes Wide Shut from the kind of bleak, ambiguous ending that was typically Kubrick’s stock in trade. It’s a happy ending, right?

Lazic: It’s funny that you should ask me that because the last time you did, it was about Phantom Thread —and I think these two endings are comparable. Plus, I’m pretty sure Phantom Thread will go down as the best movie of 2018 the same way that Eyes Wide Shut is obviously no. 1 for 1999.

Nayman: Yes, that was the thing that we were setting out to prove several thousand words ago, I think we did it. Anyway, go on.

Lazic: There is a sense of mutual delusion at the end of PTA’s film, as the couple finds a perverse system to repeat ad infinitum in order to stay satisfied with each other. But of course, who’s to say that neither of them will ever get tired of mushroom omelettes? The ending of Eyes Wide Shut is more down to earth, thanks to Alice’s pragmatism. Even though there’s a similar sense of Alice wanting Bill “flat on [his] back, helpless, tender, open, with only [her] to help,” the difference is that she wants him in that position not to overpower him, but to have sex with him, and “as soon as possible” rather than regularly. Her ambitions aren’t as big as Alma’s in Phantom Thread , perhaps because she refuses to work that hard at saving her marriage: She won’t be having crazy dreams and laughing in his face every time he needs to settle down a little just to remind him that she, too, is a person with desires and not just a perfect spouse. “Now we’re awake, forever” is a line that could have been uttered by PTA’s hopeful, mad couple, even as they begin a dreamlike (or nightmarish?) existence together. Alice, with her sense of reality in check, now has her eyes wide open. She has no patience for mindfucks.

In This Stream

1999 movies week: a celebration of the best year in film.

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• "For adult audiences, it creates a mesmerizing daydream of sexual fantasy (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"   Roger Ebert : rogerebert.com
• "[It] turns into a series of haphazard revelations that come to very little."  Owen Gleiberman : Entertainment Weekly
• "You experience this 159-minute movie at his deliberate pace and from his oddly distanced perspective. The effect is disorienting but mesmerizing."  Desson Thomson : The Washington Post
• "Every shot and camera angle was selected with great care (...) For those who view cinema as something more substantive than an evening's diversion, the release of 'Eyes Wide Shut' is an event (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"  James Berardinelli : ReelViews
• "It's empty of ideas, which is fine, but it's also empty of heat.  Stephen Hunter : The Washington Post
• "This is personal filmmaking as well as dream poetry of the kind most movie commerce has ground underfoot, and if a better studio release comes along this year I'll be flabbergasted (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"  Jonathan Rosenbaum : Chicago Reader
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EYES WIDE SHUT, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, 1999

Eyes Wide Shut (1999, 74%) Kubrick’s intense study of the human psyche yields an impressive cinematic work.

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How Tom Cruise Really Felt When He Joined Nicole Kidman In Eyes Wide Shut

It's one thing to be married to a fellow actor and shoot a movie together, but imagine working together for over a year on what was not only a legendary director's last film, but also a movie that explored the intricacies of keeping together a mundane marriage while withstanding outside temptation. This is what Tom Cruise and his then-wife Nicole Kidman went through while shooting Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut."

Released in 1999, "Eyes Wide Shut" centers around Dr. William "Bill" Harford (Cruise) and his wife Alice (Kidman), a Manhattan-based married couple who have gotten so used to the routines of domestic life that the only way sexuality plays a role anymore is through the temptations of strangers and mystery. Things start to unravel as William finds himself seeking a new kind of pleasure as he ventures outside the city to a mansion hosting a masked party at which an underground sexual ritual is taking place.

While "Eyes Wide Shut" is notable for its unique storytelling and blatant erotica, its probably best known as Stanley Kubrick's last film, as the director died before the movie was released. It's also known as one of the most "exhausting" shoots for any cast and crew (via  Vanity Fair ). According to Vanity Fair, when "Eyes Wide Shut" began shooting in the fall of 1996, Cruise and Kidman "fully expected to return to Hollywood by spring." However, filming didn't finish until 1998. Cruise and Kidman wound up spending 15 months working on "Eyes Wide Shut," which earned the Guinness World Record for "the longest continual film shoot."

So, how did Cruise feel when Kidman joined the cast of the historic film?

Brutal honesty

Originally aiming to cast Steve Martin in the lead role in 1980, 15 years later,  Stanley Kubrick eventually landed on casting Tom Cruise, at the suggestion of his producer Terry Semel. According to the Independent , Cruise flew to England to meet Kubrick in 1995, and after some basic conversation about "vintage cameras, planes, the New York Yankees," the filmmaker asked Cruise to star in "Eyes Wide Shut." After accepting, Cruise suggested his real life wife at the time play his on-screen wife as well. Kubrick apparently loved the idea, as it "introduced a new layer of psychosexual subtext" to the movie.

The couple went through a grueling shoot with Kubrick, whose unique filmmaking methods began affecting Cruise and Nicole Kidman's marriage. Kubrick decided he would psychoanalyze his married lead actors. Per Vanity Fair , Kubrick pushed Cruise and Kidman into admitting what they feared most about marriage during "conversations that the three vowed to keep secret." According to Kidman, these conversations left her then-husband subjected to "things that he didn't want to hear," and the discussions were "brutally honest at times." She also told Vanity Fair that while it was exciting that the lines of reality and fiction blurred, it was also dangerous. Cruise agreed: "I wanted this to work, but you're playing with dynamite when you act. Emotions kick up."

'Pluses and minuses' to filming a movie with your real-life spouse

In a 1999 press conference , Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were asked if they felt safe playing a married couple on screen, or if they would have felt better working alongside someone else. Cruise responded that he was "glad she played [the role in 'Eyes Wide Shut'] because of her talent." He elaborated, "As an actress, I was really excited, because she's such a great actress and artist and to share that experience together is something very special and I think that we had a lot to offer because we are married." Cruise also admitted that the entire experience "had its pluses and minuses."

While Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise would eventually divorce  in 2001 after 11 years of marriage — and only two years after the release of "Eyes Wide Shut" — they are reportedly open to a reunion as friends or co-workers as of early 2021 (via OK! Magazine ). Plus, in 2017, Kidman told Deadline that she would have continued working with Kubrick for years on end, as she really enjoyed the experience. 

"I could have stayed with Stanley [Kubrick] for five years. Never come back," she said. "I look back at that and go, 'Thank God I had this slightly zen approach to things.' Because I was married and I had my kids there. It wasn't like I was rushing to get finished, to get somewhere else. I was there, with Stanley, and I didn't care. Whatever." Kidman added, "He had a great wit and he was a philosopher, but he was never preachy. It was always coming from a place of curiosity and questioning and exploration."

Tom Cruise Questions Everything in Stanley Kubrick's Final Film

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The Big Picture

• Cruise's role in Eyes Wide Shut challenges his action-hero image, portraying vulnerability and insecurity in a surreal and thought-provoking manner.
• The film delves into male ego, desire, and insecurity, emphasizing the struggle to reconcile reality with unattainable fantasies.
• Cruise's character faces a dark night of the soul, grapples with emotions of shame and guilt, ultimately seeking reconciliation and a quiet domestic life.

On July 16, 1999, Stanley Kubrick 's greatly anticipated final film, Eyes Wide Shut , was released. Kubrick passed away a few months before the movie came out, and it remains one of the auteur's most provocative, controversial, and astonishing contributions to the cinematic art form. The film stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman , at the time married in real life and playing a couple on-screen, as a doctor and his wife who admits she has considered having an affair. The revelation sends Cruise's Dr. Bill Harford into a tailspin through the dead of night in New York City as he wanders around looking for sexual gratification, and seeking a greater sense of control over his own life.

Eyes Wide Shut

A Manhattan doctor embarks on a bizarre, night-long odyssey after his wife's admission of unfulfilled longing.

'Eyes Wide Shut' Was an Interesting Departure From Tom Cruise's Usual Roles

Cruise's 1999 was an interesting point in his career, as he also starred in Paul Thomas Anderson 's Magnolia , which released a few months later. In the years since, he has not appeared in many strictly dramatic roles , opting instead for primarily action oriented films. Two auteurist directors were able to center these challenging, three-hour long, adult dramas around his acting talent, and there are not many other examples of actors who have managed to pull that off in such a short span of time. Although the release year is admittedly somewhat arbitrary, since Eyes Wide Shut was in development for nearly six years and filmed for 400 days –– breaking the record for longest film shoot in history. It is eerie that Kubrick passed away so soon after completing the final edits on the film, considering how lengthy the production was.

Kubrick plays with Cruise's movie star persona in an interesting way, as the Cruise we know as the cocky hotshot in Top Gun or The Color of Money is nowhere to be found, neither is the heroic posture he delivered a few years earlier in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible , a role which has gone on to define his career as he returned to the franchise for the seventh installment in 2023 . Instead, Cruise is up against the ropes. He is lost, vulnerable, and desperate to heal his broken ego. Kubrick puts Cruise in a world where he is vastly in over his head . Even when Cruise is in over his head, he is typically able to craftily maneuver a fighter jet or a motorcycle to speed his way past any conflict, but in Eyes Wide Shut , there are no easy solutions to the problems he is facing.

Tom Cruise Must Face the Fragility of His Ego in 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Dr. Bill Harford seemingly has it all at the start of Eyes Wide Shut , but if you look closer it is not the case. Yes, he is attending an incredibly lavish Christmas party, he seems to have a happy family unit, and he is a successful doctor. However, he feels out of touch at this party, he is disconnected from his wife, and while he is rich, he is realizing there is a more elite class from which he is entirely shut out. Tragic events involving a young woman overdosing while with the party's host, portrayed by Sydney Pollack who previously directed Tom Cruise in The Firm, and the revelatory post-party conversation with his wife lead Cruise on a dark journey through the streets of New York. Each city block or ornate room is given an otherworldly glow thanks to the over-saturation of Christmas lights filling the frame.

The visual choices combined with the ambiguous and surreal tone place Cruise in very unfamiliar settings where he walks a liminal tightrope between dreaming and reality . The discoveries he makes are challenging, as events unfold in such a way that he ends up at a secretive party where a sexual ritual is performed, after an invitation from his friend played by Todd Field , actor-director who would go on to collaborate with Cate Blanchett in TÁR (Blanchett also happens to have a voice cameo appearance in Eyes Wide Shut). This ritual gone awry leads Cruise to some dangerous situations as the individuals involved go to great lengths to stop him from speaking about or acknowledging what had taken place in any shape or form, especially after he seems to uncover that a woman may have been murdered as a part of the ritual.

Whether the disturbing events that play out in the film are meant to be taken at face value, they prove two things to Cruise's character. Either he must accept that his fantasies are so outlandish and embrace his reality where life is a lot more... normal, or these things he aspires to be a part of are far outside what he is capable of handling . This is not only with regard to the sexual encounters he approaches, but also his idyllic perspective on what his marriage should be, or his desire to attain vast wealth and enter into an even higher status than that of a successful doctor. His ego was bruised by his wife's revelation early in the film, but the experiences he seeks out to repair it end up mangling it even further.

'Eyes Wide Shut' Subverts Expectations of a Leading Man

Considering his breakdown toward the end of the film when he realizes his wife knows about the events of the previous days, it is clear Cruise understands he is out of his depth and feels a wide range of emotions including shame, guilt, inadequacy, and fear regarding his future. Cruise's role grapples with one of the greatest fears the male ego can confront, the notion that not even his masculine bravado can control or uncover the thoughts the women in his life choose to keep from him. The insecurity seeps through his performance as it becomes clear how even in marriage there are still things people will keep from each other, and he has no power to challenge that. This is a rare form to see Cruise in , and he handles these outbursts just as well as he handles traversing rooftops at impossible speeds or clinging to the side of airplanes.

Ultimately, Cruise is put through this dark night of the soul and comes out of it in a place where he and his wife can maybe set aside the collision of ego, desire, and insecurity, and enjoy a quiet domestic life together. It is kind of a happy ending... but it's a distorted one , but Cruise allows the opportunity to relinquish all of his troubled experiences over the last few days by accepting the life he has and attempting to reconcile with Kidman in the final moments of the film.

Tom Cruise Inspired Christian Bale's Performance in 'American Psycho'

"Impressive, very nice."

Kubrick disarms our understanding of what a typical leading man should be through his treatment of Bill Harford's character. Cruise is uncomfortable , weird, and stripped down –– both literally and metaphorically –– in Eyes Wide Shut . This type of role is a challenging one for any actor to play, but especially difficult in the hands of someone with such massive celebrity status that audiences have certain expectations attached to his involvement in a film. Maybe in 1999, it did not seem quite as bizarre (although most definitely still bizarre considering the subject matter dealt with), but in retrospect Eyes Wide Shut is something quite rare for such a towering movie star to tackle with the confidence and image-conscious attitude Cruise brings to the part.

Although the film remains one of his most challenging and controversial, it is also one of the best outings Cruise has given as an on-screen performer. Some actors may have an easier time riding a motorcycle off a cliff for a film than getting into the right head space to portray such a vulnerable person. As the Mission: Impossible series continues, and Cruise shows no signs of slowing down his life as an action-junkie, we can hope he might return one day to a film as surreal, complicated, and thoughtful as Eyes Wide Shut.

Eyes Wide Shut is available to rent or buy on Apple TV+

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Kubrick didn't love LA, friend says July 7, 1999 Cruise: 'Eyes Wide Shut' gave him ulcer June 28, 1999 Remembering Kubrick as a 'demented perfectionist' May 17, 1999 Steamy Kubrick film nabs R rating May 4, 1999 Spielberg, Cruise, Kidman among mourners at Kubrick service March 12, 1999 Reviewer offers different take on Kubrick's career March 8, 1999 Kubrick remembered as filmmaker who transcended the medium March 8, 1999 Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick dead at 70 March 7, 1999

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Eyes Wide Shut: What you never knew about the Stanley Kubrick movie starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman

FIFTEEN years ago Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman starred in Eyes Wide Shut. But they weren’t the director’s first choice to star in the film. Here’s what you never knew.

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FIFTEEN years ago Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, opened around the world.

Setting records for the longest shoot in movie history, it was an excruciating labour of love for lead stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman — one that would often be traced back to the alleged start of their marriage’s decline. Throughout the process, cryptic reports implied that Kubrick’s obsessive perfectionism had reached peak levels, which was especially eyebrow-raising given the film’s sexual explicitness. The director, who won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey , died of a heart attack in March 1999, days after screening the final cut. Had he lived, perhaps we’d have more perspective on the movie’s production — or perhaps not, as Kubrick was notoriously reclusive.

An excerpt from Amy Nicholson’s book, Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor , printed in Vanity Fair , offers details about the project’s goings-on. Coupled with a 1999 Entertainment Weekly article pegged to the film’s release and a Los Angeles Times report about its box-office expectations, the passage reveals some things you may not know about Eyes Wide Shut .

1. Kubrick always intended to cast an actual married couple as the movie’s leads, but Cruise and Kidman weren’t who he had in mind. The initial pair he thought of was Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

2. Sydney Pollack’s role first went to Harvey Keitel, who dropped out due to scheduling conflicts.

3. Jennifer Jason Leigh was originally tapped to play Marion Nathanson but left mid-production due to scheduling conflicts. Marie Richardson wound up playing that part.

4. When Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise arrived in London in the fall of 1996 to shoot the movie, they expected to be wrapped and back in Los Angeles by the following spring. Instead, the production didn’t conclude until January 1998, making it the Guinness World Record’s longest-running film shoot in history. (Kidman and Cruise reportedly signed open-ended contracts that stated they’d stick with the project no matter how long it took to complete.)

5. To say Kubrick is a perfectionist is an understatement: His intent was to film scenes so many times that it would wear down his actors and they’d forget the cameras existed. During the course of shooting Eyes Wide Shut , the director filmed 95 takes of Cruise walking through a door.

6. Cruise was so anxious about giving the legendary director what he wanted that he developed an ulcer. He never told Kubrick.

7. Frenzied tabloids ran reports that Cruise and Kidman’s marriage was crumbling in late ‘90s. If anything, that notion was only enhanced by their Eyes Wide Shut dynamic. Kubrick coaxed the couple into sharing their personal reservations about the marriage with him, in turn transferring those troubles onto their characters, Bill and Alice. Kidman called it a kind of “brutally honest” anti-therapy, as no one asked how they felt about each other’s criticisms.

8. Director Todd Field ( Little Children , In the Bedroom ), who starred in the movie as piano player Nick Nightingale, said of Kidman and Cruise: “You’ve never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director.”

9. Kubrick was terrified of flying, so instead of travelling to New York City to shoot in Greenwich Village, he built a top-secret replica of the neighbourhood at England’s Pinewood Studios. A set designer was sent to measure the exact width of the streets and distance between newspaper stands.

10. Kubrick allowed only a skeleton crew to remain on the set throughout filming. One rare outsider permitted to watch the action unfold was Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson. Cruise was in talks for the lead role in Anderson’s Magnolia and had to sneak him past security. ‘’I asked [Kubrick], ‘Do you always work with so few people?’ Anderson recalled. “He gave me this look and said, ‘Why? How many people do you need?’ I felt like such a Hollywood a**hole.’’

11. Cruise isn’t the only actor who filmed dozens of takes. Vinessa Shaw, who played the prostitute Domino, recalled having shot about 90 takes for a single scene.

12. Had Kubrick not died before the movie opened, he may still be making adjustments to it today, like he did with The Shining after its release. “I think Stanley would have been tinkering with it for the next 20 years,” Kidman said. “He was still tinkering with movies he made decades ago. He was never finished. It was never perfect enough.”

13. Warner Bros. wanted a $20 million opening weekend to consider the movie a success. It surpassed that, grossing $21.7 million across 2,400 screens. Marketing tracking studies for the film showed it had an awareness level of 78 but lacked the first-choice status among moviegoers that other summer fare like Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Big Daddy saw.

This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post .

An Australian TikToker interviewed director Baz Luhrmann on the street without knowing who he was.

Tom Cruise played a wicked prank on his Top Gun: Maverick co-star Glen Powell that left the young actor fearing for his safety.

Aussie actress Nicole Kidman can be seen stripping off for a hot sex scene with Hollywood heart-throb Zac Efron in the trailer for a new Netflix rom-com.

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How Many Films Did Tom Cruise And Nicole Kidman Star In Together?

When we talk about the '90s power couples, there are a few that have stuck in our minds through the decades. Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman , Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow, Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, and of course, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. These iconic couples had people invested in their relationships from the moment they were spotted arm-in-arm on a red carpet all the way to the second news of their breakups broke.

Kidman and Cruise, in particular, caused a great stir when their marriage ended. Everybody remembers the striking image of Kidman as she strolled the streets in apparent glee as the divorce was finalized. Later, the "Big Little Lies" star opened up about the relationship saying, "Our life together was perfect. It took me a very long time to heal. It was a shock to my system," she added, "That was a great relationship. I think it ran its course. I was really damaged and not sure whether [love and marriage] was ever going to happen again to me," via InTouch Weekly . 

But as we all know, it all worked out in the end. Kidman found love in singer Keith Urban while Cruise went on to marry Katie Holmes and have a child with her before splitting up after six years of matrimony. And while Cruise and Kidman's marriage didn't last, it's safe to say their contributions to cinema will stand the test of time, especially in the movies they did together. 

Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise starred in three movies together

Unsurprisingly, the two Hollywood stars' paths first crossed on the set of the film, "Days of Thunder." In a 2017 interview with People , Nicole Kidman fondly reminisced about the first time she saw Tom Cruise during an audition for her role in the film, "I remember being so nervous and seeing Tom Cruise drive up in a Porsche [. . .] and he got out of the car and walked through, and I was like 'Ah!' and my jaw dropped." She also added that she was intimidated auditioning in front of the movie's executives and Cruise and believed she wouldn't get the part. But she was called and offered the role on the very same day.

Although Kidman had previously gained notoriety from working in the Australian thriller, "Dead Calm," and several other Australian films, she broke through the American film scene with "Days of Thunder." At the time of filming, Kidman was 22, while Cruise was 28 and in the process of getting a divorce from his first wife, Mimi Rogers. In a 1995 interview with Playboy , Rogers would share that the marriage primarily ended due to Cruise's desire to become a monk, which didn't happen. Months before the film's release in 1990, the divorce was finalized and Kidman and Cruise went public shortly after. The actors wed in a private ceremony on Christmas Eve that same year.

Eyes Wide Shut was one of their most notable projects

In 1992, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise appeared in their first film as a married couple, "Far and Away." And while the film did relatively well, their big break as an iconic Hollywood couple would happen in 1999 with Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut." The official trailer for the film featured several explicit scenes, including some steamy kisses shared between the real-life couple.

Unsurprisingly, the couple's chemistry sizzled in the erotic mystery. In 1995, the couple admitted to Vanity Fair that their initial attraction was sexual. Kidman gushed, "I thought he was the sexiest man I'd ever seen in my life." And Cruise also said something similar, "Instant lust, that's what I felt," he added, "I thought she was amazingly sexy and stunning. It grew into love and respect."

Due to the themes of infidelity in the movie and their striking performances, many believed that Kidman and Cruise were tapping into real-life emotions. But Kidman denied these rumors in a 2020 interview with The New York Times , "We were happily married through that," she added, "We would go go-kart racing after those scenes. We'd rent out a place and go racing at 3 in the morning." Sadly, the couple's divorce was finalized in 2001 after 11 years of marriage. Although the pair has been vague about what went down behind the scenes, many have speculated that this might be why they really got divorced . 

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12 Things You Might Not Know About Tom Cruise

By jake rossen | may 28, 2024.

Defining movie star is somewhat subjective. If it’s a combination of charisma, audience interest, and box office success, then one of the few performers that continue to meet the definition is Tom Cruise. The actor, who has been on screens for over 40 years, regularly makes movies that are considered appointment viewing in theaters even in the era of streaming. His Mission: Impossible series alone has brought in over $1.3 billion domestically.

Part of Cruise’s appeal is his enigmatic public persona. He rarely lets his guard down, preferring to let his work speak for him. Nonetheless, there’s still plenty to know about his life and career.

Tom Cruise started doing stunts early on.

He was a pretty good high school wrestler., cruise auditioned for risky business with a chipped tooth., he didn’t love cocktail ., cruise directed an episode of television., cruise took heat for two adaptations., cruise could have been in the shawshank redemption ., cruise was involved in one of the longest film shoots of all time., he has a cousin who is also an actor., cruise rescued multiple people from maritime disaster., he asked to be included in a photo with some famous directors., cruise gifts colleagues with hundreds of holiday cakes..

Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, Cruise seemed to be drawn to physical activity and danger from an early age. In 2022, the actor recalled that when he was around 4 years old, he thought it would be a good idea to jump off the roof of his childhood home while using a sheet as a parachute. "It’s that moment when you jump off the roof and you go, ‘This is not gonna work,’” he said. “’This is terrible. I’m gonna die.’ And I hit the ground so hard. Luckily, it was wet … And I saw stars in the daytime for the first time, and I remember looking up, going, ‘This is very interesting.’”

Cruise’s mother, Mary, separated from his father, Tom Senior, in 1976, when Cruise was 14. (The actor would later allege that Senior had been abusive toward him.) The family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and Cruise also spent some time in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he briefly considered becoming a Franciscan priest. Eventually, he rejoined his family and they settled in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where he joined the varsity high school wrestling team as a junior and senior. During the 1979-1980 year, the team went 14-4-1.

The wrestling may have indirectly played a role in his career choice. After a leg injury prevented him from continuing, he decided to investigate acting and signed up for a role in a school production of Guys and Dolls . “All of a sudden, I felt like I knew what I was doing,” he said in 1983. “And I got all this attention, and it just felt right. So I came to New York. I wanted to try [acting].”

In 1981, Cruise appeared in a small role in Endless Love and as a military cadet in Taps . Two years later, he appeared in the teen sex comedy Losin’ It and the football drama All the Right Moves . Cruise also scored a role as a street punk in The Outsiders . It was during filming of The Outsiders that Cruise auditioned for Risky Business , which cast him as a preppy kid who runs amok when his parents leave town. “I told them, ‘I can't afford to tamper with my Outsiders character because I have to work tonight,’” he said in 1983. “’I can't take a shower, even.’ I was all greasy, had a chipped tooth and a tattoo, and an Okie drawl. And they cast me for this clean-cut boy.”

Risky Business was considered Cruise's true breakout role. It also made Cruise synonymous with Ray-Ban sunglasses, which he later wore to great effect in 1986’s Top Gun .

The mid- to late-1980s was a period where Cruise was able to demonstrate his dramatic chops with prestige directors in films like 1985's Legend (Ridley Scott), 1986’s The Color of Money (Martin Scorsese), 1988’s Rain Man (Barry Levinson), and 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone). In the middle of this impressive run came Cocktail (1988), a relatively lightweight drama about a bartender who relocates to Jamaica. It was “not a crowning jewel,” he told Rolling Stone in 1992. The film earned a Golden Raspberry Award, or “Razzie,” for Worst Picture, the same year that Rain Man won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Given his collaborative nature and intense interest in filmmaking, it’s somewhat surprising Cruise has yet to helm a feature film. But he has gotten behind the camera. In 1993, Cruise directed an episode of the Showtime series Fallen Angels , an anthology set largely in 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles. In the episode, titled “The Frightening Frammis,” a con man (Peter Gallagher) has the misfortune to cross paths with a femme fatale named Babe (Isabella Rosellini). The series was produced by Sydney Pollack, who had just directed Cruise in the 1993 film The Firm .

When Cruise was cast as the vampire Lestat in 1994’s Interview With the Vampire , the book’s author, Anne Rice, was a vocal critic, saying she preferred someone like Daniel Day-Lewis for the role. After seeing Cruise in the part, Rice changed her mind, calling him “wonderful.” Cruise had a similar experience in 2012’s Jack Reacher , where fans of the Lee Child book series found him smaller in stature compared to Child’s towering protagonist. The film did well, however, meriting  a 2016 sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back .

The list of movies Cruise has been offered (or at least had discussions about doing) is long, and the list of movies he’s turned down is likely even longer. Among them: Footloose , Edward Scissorhands , and The Shawshank Redemption . Director and writer Frank Darabont, who adapted the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption for the screen in 1994, said that producer Rob Reiner offered to acquire the script so he could direct and his A Few Good Men star Cruise could step into the role of Andy Dufresne. Darabont was tempted, but ultimately decided to make the movie himself. He cast Tim Robbins as Dufresne.

Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman agreed to star in director Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut , which examines the complicated marriage of a young couple tempted by forces outside their union. Kubrick ( 2001: A Space Odyssey ), a notorious perfectionist, shot the film for an astounding 15 months, far beyond the typical four- to six-month shoot of many films. Guinness World Records recognizes it as the longest continuous production in cinema history. (Interrupted shoots are a different story: Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age drama Boyhood shot for 39 days over a window spanning from 2002 to 2013.)

Eyes Wide Shut was met with a tepid reception, though it proved bountiful for Cruise. While on set, he met with director Paul Thomas Anderson, who cast him as a motivational speaker in 1999’s Magnolia . That part earned Cruise an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He had previously been nominated for Born on the Fourth of July and for Jerry Maguire (1996), though he has yet to win.

Cruise wasn’t the only member of his family to get into acting. His fraternal cousin, William Mapother, is also in the business and has shared several of Cruise’s film sets. Mapother was a production assistant before getting parts in Magnolia (1999) and in 2002’s Minority Report , playing a desk clerk who is threatened by Cruise’s distressed protagonist. Mapother might be best known as Ethan Rom, a character of dubious intentions on ABC’s drama Lost .

In 1996, Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman were aboard a yacht near Capri, Italy, when they came upon a family floating in a lifeboat whose own yacht had caught on fire. They climbed aboard Cruise’s vessel until the Coast Guard arrived.

A decade prior, it was Cruise himself who needed a hand. While filming Top Gun , he was dragged underwater by parachute lines. According to United Press International, Navy swim school instructors rushed to pull him out.

Shooting The Last Samurai with Cruise in 2003, director Ed Zwick was surprised to see several A-list directors dropping by the set to see Cruise. When the actor learned that David Fincher ( Fight Club ), Cameron Crowe (who directed Cruise in Jerry Maguire ), and others posed for a group photo with Zwick while he was busy, he asked that he be retroactively placed in the image.

To work with Tom Cruise is to risk being sent a cake every holiday for the rest of your life. (Or his.) Each year, the actor orders white chocolate coconut Bundt cakes from Doan’s Bakery in Los Angeles and has them sent to a list of recipients, including former co-stars. According to former talk show host James Corden, Cruise himself has never tried the cake. (Other stories, however, have him tasting it as part of a “cake-off” while Cruise’s then-wife Katie Holmes and Diane Keaton were making a film together in 2008. The cake was reportedly Keaton’s favorite.)

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Tom Cruise’s New ‘Mission: Impossible’ Movie Delayed Again After His Appearance Shocks Fans

The movie was already pushed to next year, but now a release date it uncertain amid huge production delays.

• The new Mission: Impossible movie has been delayed due to issues with a $29 million submarine, pushing back filming and increasing costs.
• Fans eagerly awaiting the latest installment starring Tom Cruise may have to wait longer, with the release date still uncertain.
• Concerns about Cruise's appearance have surfaced, with medical experts suggesting his saggy skin might be due to liposuction or simply aging.

Tom Cruise shocked fans earlier this month with his so-called saggy appearance, leading medical experts to chime in, but now his fan base is facing a new surprise – his latest Mission: Impossible has been delayed again.

These Tom Cruise Movies Have Grossed Over $100 Million At The Box Office

A broken submarine has delayed cruise’s new movie.

The Mirror reports that the eighth installment of Tom Cruise's blockbuster series has encountered further delays due to an issue with a £23 million ($29 million USD) submarine. According to insiders, the gimbal, which is responsible for lowering the 120-foot-high structure, became jammed under its weight and required repairs.

"They’re not happy as it puts production behind, which costs a lot of money per day," a source revealed, explaining the technical glitch has pushed the filming schedule back by several weeks and increased production costs.

Fans are eagerly anticipating the new movie, which will see Cruise reprise his famous role of secret agent Ethan Hunt. The film was initially slated for a summer release, but persistent delays have plagued the project. This includes last year's Hollywood writers' strike, which had already caused significant disruptions to the film's production schedule.

Initially planned for a summer release, the movie was subsequently postponed to May 2025. However, with these new complications, the exact release date remains uncertain.

The majority of the movie has been filmed in the UK, with a significant portion shot at Longcross Studios in Surrey. But some fans wonder if it’ll live up to the hype – and not only because of the production problems and release date delay. New images of Tom left the Internet shocked, as his usually toned physique didn’t live up to fan expectations.

Why Tom Shocked Fans With His Recent Appearance

The photos, which depict Cruise going shirtless, had some people accuse of him having saggy skin. Multiple medical experts chimed in , with some saying he appears to have plastic surgery, while others think his appearance is mostly the result of ageing. But they do agree that Tom looks good for being in his 60s.

Dr. David Hill, a plastic surgeon from Chicago, mentioned to the Daily Mail that Tom's loose skin around his midsection might be a result of undergoing liposuction.

“Usually, if you lose weight naturally over time, you get less of that skin rippling and irregularity, because it's gradual,” he claimed. “With liposuction, because it's more immediate, the skin doesn't have time to contract as much... so Tom's Cruise's saggy skin could be a hallmark of [liposuction].”

However, Dr Howard Sobel, a cosmetic dermatologic surgeon, told the publication he thinks Tom’s changing appearance is just due to age, explaining, “The areas of your chest, and the areas below your chest, the skin around your ribs and your abs are very often the first to lose the elasticity, especially in a man.”

Tom was recently accused of spending a small fortune on his looks , but given the recent reports of delays, it may be a while before fans get to see his face up-close on the big screen.

10 Best Movies About Broken Marriages, Ranked

U nfortunately, things don't always go as we intend them to, and marriage isn't an exception. Whether this has to do with financial problems, lack of intimacy and communication, or even infidelity, it isn't uncommon for marriages to be unsuccessful, even if the two people involved were initially head over heels for each other. This proves that even the most passionate and loving relationships require work and commitment.

While many movies — especially romance films — shine a positive light on romantic relationships, there are engaging dramas that explore the other side of the coin, making audiences reconsider whether they should tie the knot. From Blue Valentine to Scenes From a Marriage , these are the best movies about broken marriages that send out thoughtful, valuable messages on relationships and human connection .

'Blue Valentine' (2010)

Director: derek cianfrance.

Derek Cianfrance 's heart-wrenching romance drama Blue Valentine stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams (in an Oscar-nominated role) as a very believable working-class couple with a young daughter, Frankie ( Faith Wladyka ). By crossing-cutting between two time periods, the film highlights the changes in their marriage and the ultimate deterioration of their relationship.

At its core, the beautifully shot Blue Valentine is a painful breakdown of a marriage . It is depicted through a series of beautifully heartbreaking scenes and emphasizes the importance of parenting, including how childhood experiences can impact adult relationships. Through its moving but captivating narrative, this devastating love tale highlights how some relationships are not built to last, even if couples are seemingly completely in love with each other at the start.

blue valentine

Release Date 2010-12-16

Cast Reila Aphrodite, John Doman, Ben Shenkman, Ryan Gosling, Mike Vogel, Michelle Williams

Runtime 120

Genres Drama, Romance, Documentary

Watch on Max

'Eyes Wide Shut' (1999)

Director: stanley kubrick.

Stanley Kubrick 's final feature is an essential erotic thriller, even though everyone has probably seen it by now. The story centers around an upper-middle-class couple, Dr. Bill and Mrs. Alice Harford, played by Tom Cruise in a great dramatic performance and Nicole Kidman (who is just as good). Their relationship is put to the test when Alice tells William about her sexual fantasies and unfulfilled longing. He then embarks on an obsessive, night-long odyssey of sexual adventure.

Equal amounts sensual and horrifying, Eyes Wide Shut suggests that even married people have secrets and hidden desires , which can lead to a sense of distance between partners; it is an intriguing exploration of guilt in relationships that also deals with capitalism and fragile masculinity. While the two characters do not go separate ways by the end, it is reasonable to say that Alice and William's relationship is doomed, especially considering that they decide to ignore the adultery they are capable of committing.

Eyes Wide Shut

Release Date 1999-07-16

Cast Leslie Lowe, Jackie Sawiris, Madison Eginton, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Tom Cruise

Runtime 159

Genres Drama, Mystery, Thriller, Documentary

Rent on Apple TV

'Marriage Story' (2019)

Director: noah baumbach.

Based on Noah Baumbach 's own experiences when he and Jennifer Jason Leigh divorced in 2013 ( via Cosmopolitan ), Marriage Story explores the emotional scars that divorce leaves behind and the painful attempt to move on with one's life. It stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as theater director Charlie and L.A. movie actress Nicole. After numerous sessions of marital mediation, the two decide to put an end to their decade-long marriage, struggling to make it work for the sake of their eight-year-old son, Henry ( Azhy Robertson ).

Baumbach's tale of acceptance, grief, repressed anger, and frustration is realistic and heartbreaking . This Netflix tearjerker reinforces the fact that a strong relationship foundation requires work and offers a deteriorating portrayal of a once healthy, loving relationship and its effects. While its narrative is poignant and well-crafted, Marriage Story benefits the most from its staggering performances.

Marriage Story

Release Date 2019-09-28

Cast Ray Liotta, Merritt Wever, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Mark O'Brien, Scarlett Johansson

Runtime 136

Genres Comedy, Documentary

Watch on Netflix

'An Unmarried Woman' (1978)

Director: paul mazursky.

While released in 1978 , An Unmarried Woman is a very modern film, essentially in the progressive messages it sends. It follows Erica ( Jill Clayburgh ), a wealthy woman from Manhattan's Upper East Side who navigates her identity and sexuality after her husband of 16 years leaves her for a younger woman.

The importance of love and self-sufficiency are clearly the most poignant messages in Paul Mazursky 's film, which perfectly tackles loneliness and sexuality. With an incredible acting effort from Clayburgh at its center, An Unmarried Woman is a must-see for those who are looking for a film that meditates on divorce without actually showing the decay of a relationship and focusing on the aftermath instead. Plus, what is fascinating about this humorous social observation, too, is how it sheds light on feminist politics through the protagonist's story.

An Unmarried Woman

Release Date 1978-05-24

Cast Patricia Quinn, Cliff Gorman, Alan Bates, Jill Clayburgh, Michael Murphy, Kelly Bishop

Runtime 124

Genres Drama, Romance, Comedy, Documentary

Buy on Amazon

'Gone Girl' (2014)

Director: david fincher.

David Fincher 's beloved twisted drama based on Gillian Flynn 's bestselling novel of the same name follows Nick Dunne ( Ben Affleck ), a man who is suspected of having something to do with his wife's ( Rosamund Pike in a riveting, career-defining, Oscar-nominated performance) sudden disappearance on the occasion of their fifth wedding anniversary. Her vanishing has become the focus of an intense social media circus; the question everyone is dying to answer is: is Nick innocent?

If readers are looking for an incredible psychological thriller that deals with toxic relationships but escalates into something so much more sinister, Gone Girl is the pick. Meditating on loyalty, honesty, deception, and even identity and power, this epic Fincher provocatively emphasizes the importance of open conversations in relationships . It is impossible to describe Gone Girl without spoiling it a bit too much. However, it is beyond clear that the relationship shared by the two is far from successful.

Release Date 2014-10-03

Cast Neil Patrick Harris, Kim Dickens, Tyler Perry, Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon

Runtime 149 minutes

Genres Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Watch on DirecTV

'A Woman Under the Influence' (1974)

Director: john cassavetes.

A Woman Under the Influence is a soul-shattering character study unlike any other. The story follows a Los Angeles housewife, played by the talented Gena Rowlands , who navigates between trying to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, and the perfect woman. Meanwhile, Mabel sinks into depression, and the only way to fix her increasingly erratic and volatile behavior, according to her husband Nick ( Peter Falk ), is institutionalization.

This truly captivating film by John Cassavetes is aided by Rowlands' tour de force performance, which ranks high among the best of all time. A Woman Under the Influence is a very dramatic and devastating multi-layered story about mental health and incompatibility that may hit too close to home due to the feminist themes it tackles. It's impossible not to feel for the three-dimensional Mabel — a woman who desperately tries to be seen and loved — and the influence that the two domineering male figures have on her life.

A Woman Under The Influence

Release Date 1974-11-18

Cast Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk

Runtime 155

Genres Drama

'Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?' (1966)

Director: mike nichols.

Elizabeth Taylor 's second Oscar win (after being nominated five times, making the star one of the Golden Age actors with the most Oscars ) came after she starred in Mike Nichols ' Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? , a tale of illusion and reality based on Edward Albee 's 1962 play of the same name. The story centers around an aging couple (Taylor and Richard Burton ) who use their young houseguests to fuel emotional pain towards each other.

Set over the course of a very emotionally distressing night, this flawless adaptation illustrates the shattered American dream, touching on topics of marriage and family with sharp-razor, hurtful words. Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf ? will probably make audiences second-guess getting married, as it totally dismantles the idea of a happy and fulfilled matrimony . Be it as it may, Nichols' movie is undeniably good, intense, and charged with strong emotion.

Watch on Tubi

'La Notte' (1961)

Director: michelangelo antonioni.

Starring Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni , La Notte is a wonderful new Italian cinema movie centering around an unfaithful couple, married for several years, who struggle to separate even though they want to . Needless to say, this can only result in the deterioration of a once-loving marriage.

Given its slow pace, which is not to everyone's taste, some viewers may consider this character study of detached people tedious and dull. However, La Notte could not be a more intriguing exploration of alienation and disconnection, providing an interesting sneak peek inside a couple's doomed relationship. Despite its heartbreaking narrative, Michelangelo Antonioni 's movie is incredibly romantic in its own way, playing like an elegant, heart-wrenching poem. Plus, it perfectly captures the filmmaker's essence of work.

'A Separation' (2011)

Director: asghar farhadi.

This Middle East must-see film by Asghar Farhadi tells the story of a married couple ( Leila Hatami and Payman Maadi ) faced with a difficult decision — they must improve the life of their daughter by moving to another country or stay in Iran and look after a suffering parent ( Ali-Asghar Shahbazi ) who has Alzheimer's disease. The argument leaves the couple with no choice but to divorce; however, the consequences may be more severe than anticipated.

Class struggles, family values, and morality are all part of this superb movie's essence. Demonstrating the conflict between two households, A Separation is a fascinating adult drama that offers audiences an intriguing look at complex relationships and the morally complex dilemmas they face. It is a film that knows no borders and is essential for fans of the genre, though at times it is a bit overlooked.

A Separation

Release Date 2011-03-15

Cast Merila Zare'i, Sarina Farhadi, Leila Hatami, Shahab Hosseini, Peyman Moaadi, Sareh Bayat

Rating PG-13

Runtime 123

Genres Drama, Documentary

'Scenes From a Marriage' (1974)

Director: ingmar bergman.

The blueprint for the Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain series of the same name (and arguably the best of the two), Ingmar Bergman 's five-hour, six-part television series is among the best pieces of media that deal with marriage. Though less detailed than its TV counterpart, Scenes From a Marriage 's theatrical release provides audiences with the same harrowing tale revolving around the years of love and turmoil that bind Marianne ( Liv Ullmann ) and Johan ( Erland Josephson ) through matrimony, infidelity, and divorce.

Like other films on this list, Scenes From a Marriage will likely have audiences questioning matrimony thanks to its extremely realistic and heartfelt narrative elevated by fantastic performances and humane characters. It is a meticulous study of intimacy, love fading, and the alternations in relationships, which has raised the bar for romantic dramas.

NEXT: 14 Great Romantic Movies Where the Lovers Don't End Up Together, According to Reddit