Being Married To Tom Cruise Gave Nicole Kidman Protection In Hollywood
For New York Magazine’s Women & Power issue, Nicole Kidman talked all about her time in Hollywood, working with women and her experiences with #MeToo-related fuckery. Nicole talks about her “power” in the movie industry and how Tom Cruise helped her achieve it. No, not through the telekinetic abilities she developed through Scientology; she only uses those on weekends when she fights crime.
Nicole opened up about how it’s still hard to get movies made even though she’s a huge star because female characters need to be more “glamorous”:
“My power in the industry is being able to go, ‘Can we get this made?’ And people saying, ‘We’ll give you some money.’ And then I get to make the choices… Destroyer was hard to get made. You have a female director, Karyn Kusama. You have me in a lead role as an avenging undercover cop who looks the way I look in that movie — not glamorous. It’s about a very complicated, angry woman. People are not going, ‘We can’t wait to make this film!'”
So a movie about a homely lady cop getting sweet revenge is hard to get made but Bewitched had an $85 million budget? Hollywood truly is a mess.
Nicole doesn’t really talk about being married to Tom Cruise, because if you were married to Tom Cruise, you’d probably want to forget about it too. But Nicole, who was married to Tom for 11 years from 1990 to 2001, says that being married to a powerful Hollywood movie star protected her from sexual harassment, because asshole creeps respect men but not women.
“Being married to Tom Cruise at 22 is something I’m always reluctant to talk about, because I’m married now to the man who is my great love [Keith Urban], and it almost feels disrespectful… That said, I got married very young, but it definitely wasn’t power for me — it was protection. 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.”
I’m glad that being with Tom allowed Nicole to avoid creeps like Harvey Weinstein, but Tom Cruise doesn’t scream “protection” to me. He looks more like he screams: “great skincare routine”. I just need to remember that it’s symbolic a protection, like a force-field around Nicole that protects her from danger without ever actually making physical contact. …For some reason all I can picture is Nicole Kidman surrounded by creepy Hollywood guys while Tom Cruise fights them off like it’s West Side Story.
Pic: Wenn.com