Nicole Kidman says her relationship with Tom Cruise taught her an
important lesson about love in the limelight.
The Oscar winner,
54, appears on the cover of October's Harper's Bazaar in which she talks
about her marriage to Keith Urban. She was also asked about her first
marriage — and whether she felt annoyed by the press focusing so maniacally
on the relationship.
"I was young. I think I offered it up?" she
said of being married to her Days of Thunder and Eyes Wide Shut co-star, 59,
from 1990 to 2001. (The exes, who reportedly disagreed on the merits of
Scientology, share daughter Bella Kidman Cruise, 28, and Connor Cruise,
26.)
However, that high-profile divorce that made headlines around
the globe for years didn't cease her openness toward love — or what she
shares publicly about it to this day.
"Maybe I've gotten a bit
more trepidatious, but I'm always trying to be as open as possible,"
explained Kidman, who went on to have a brief engagement to Lenny Kravitz
and then marry Urban in 2006. "I just prefer to live in the world that way.
I'm wary at times, and I’ve been hurt, but at the same time I much prefer a
warm approach rather than a prickly shutdown approach."
She
added, "My husband, Keith, says that when he met me, he said, 'How’s your
heart?' And I apparently responded, 'Open.'"
Kidman claimed she was more into the country singer, 53, than he was
to her when they met in 2005 at an event called G’Day L.A., which honors
notable Australians. Urban gave a speech in which he gushed about his mother
and Kidman's sister Antonia, her date, leaned over to her and said that men
seemingly don't get better than Urban.
"'Yeah, but he’s not gonna be interested in me,'" Kidman
recalled replying to her sister. "And he actually wasn’t that interested in
me at the time — which he now says is not true; he was just sort of
intimidated."
Four months later, with the assistance of so-called "angels"
pulling strings "behind the scenes," they started talking by phone.
"Yeah.
I was really, really into him," she said. “He took a little time. And he's
like, 'That is so incorrect, Nicole.'"
Kidman doesn't pretend
that marriage isn't work, but said it's the good kind.
"We’re
always working through stuff, but it's very much love-based, so there’s an
enormous amount of give and take," she said. "I want him to have the best
life he can have, and he responds the same way."
Despite being burned in the past, she still shares steamy pix
of them together — including this one for their 15th anniversary. She said
it was taken at Madonna and Guy Oseary's Oscars party in 2017 by famed
French photographer JR.
"He was like, 'You want to have a photo taken?'" she recalled.
"And I was like, 'Baby, kiss my neck.' And he did that," referring to the
lick.
Kidman said she and Urban "really love parenting together,"
referring to daughters, Sunday, 13, and Faith, 10.
The superstar
actress admits she does "not have a big social life. I have my work,"
including recently Nine Perfect Strangers and ahead Being the Ricardos, Roar
and The Northman. "I have my family, I have my own inner landscape that I
explore. I choose that probably more than I choose to be out
partying.”
