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Imagining Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's Entire Relationship Through Their Films

From 1990 until their dramatic divorce in 2001, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were one of Hollywood's hottest couples. Nobody knows what happened behind the scenes of their three movies, but you can't help thinking you do.
Screengrab via Netflix

What people forget is that Tom Cruise was something special. The way he slid across that hardwood floor, straight into our hearts. He was a hotshot. As a bartender, as a fighter pilot, in various other military positions, he was a natural. He made it look easy, but he also worked very fucking hard. This kid came from nothing, emerged out of nowhere—a "Yankee," as Robert Duvall calls him in the 1990 NASCAR drama Days of Thunder—and he wasn't about to give it all up. There was that boyish grin that said, "Can you believe how good I am at this?"

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But behind that smile seemed to lurk an ego, a temper, and an inferiority complex. Nicole Kidman must have sensed this.

There is a scene in Days of Thunder, at the beginning of their relationship, where Cruise and Kidman first sleep together. Cruise is looking at her and says he knows she's asking herself, "How could I, a brilliant brain doctor, be in bed with a guy who drives a car for a living?" We can see that he's right, but it's also obvious why she's there. "Do something that will make me respect you," she says, and gets on top of him. Afterwards he explains how drafting works, using Sweet'N Low packets to represent cars and her upper thigh as the racetrack. Sure, he's troubled, but he's also charming and exciting. Tom Cruise must have been hard to resist.

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A few months ago, I found myself interviewing for a job with Netflix's original content department, and the woman on the phone asked me which things on Netflix I had been enjoying lately. I realized at this point that I was probably supposed to mention a few of Netflix's series, perhaps Orange Is the New Black or House of Cards, but I hadn't actually watched any of Netflix's original programming. I was living by the (questionable) notion that I didn't want any job that would require me to pretend to be somebody I'm not, so I told her the truth: "I've been watching a lot of old Tom Cruise movies lately." I received a very polite rejection email a few days later.

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Consequently, I've had a lot of time to think about Tom Cruise. I'm sure I could look online and learn lots of things about his life, and some of it would even be true, but I don't want to. The thing that makes Tom Cruise such a great movie star is that he always fully inhabits whatever character he's playing, but you still never forget you're watching Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise and the character are two separate entities, but they're also one.

What's interesting to me is that even though I've never tried to learn anything about Tom Cruise, I could still sketch an accurate biography: I know when he became famous, who he's dated, and what religion he practices. I know that, for the last decade, he's been both something of a punchline and one of the highest-paid actors in the world. And I know that, for most of the 90s, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were one of Hollywood's most important couples.

Inevitably, what we know about a celebrity's private life contributes to the way we watch their movies—just look at the Woody Allen oeuvre. But it's just as true that the characters on screen affect our perceptions of the actors in the real world. I understand that I know absolutely nothing about what Tom Cruise's marriage with Nicole Kidman was like. And yet, watching the three films the couple made together over the course of a decade, it's impossible not to imagine that I have some sort of insight into their life together.

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Screengrab via YouTube

The first time we see Nicole Kidman meet Tom Cruise, it's in Days of Thunder. (They met on set.) Tom Cruise is incapacitated, bedridden, and recovering from a near-fatal injury. He is also temporarily blind; he was in a wreck with his rival, Michael Rooker, and had to be life-flighted to the hospital. Nicole Kidman, who is Tom Cruise's doctor, reassures him that his brain is merely swollen and his sight will return as he heals. Days later, Kidman visits Cruise in his hospital room, but because he had not seen her the first time, he does not recognize her, and so they are forced to meet again.

Because of a previous incident, it is a little awkward. When Tom Cruise was still on the ascent, his racing buddies hired a stripper, dressed her as a cop, and had her "arrest" and grope Cruise, to hoots and hollers. Seeing another PYT in a position of authority, Cruise assumes that he is being pranked again. As Kidman begins to examine him, Cruise laughs, grabs her hand, places it on his dick, and asks, "Isn't this what you're really looking for?" "Well that's interesting enough," she says, "but it's just not my specialty." She exits, and Cruise realizes what he's done.

Directed by Tony Scott and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, Days of Thunder is quintessentially of its period. It's not necessarily a great movie, but it has held up; even its failures add to its charm. There are multiple extended race scenes soundtracked by a truly awesome electric guitar symphony. The whole crowd seems to be wearing Marlboro red. For some reason, every scene looks like it was shot about 20 minutes before sunset. The screen perpetually looks like it belongs on a poster sold at Sam Goody.

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The film marks the beginning of the Kidman/Cruise relationship, but the love story is just a subplot. The film is mostly about Tom Cruise, a young IndyCar racer, and his attempts to cross over into the world of larger stock cars. After the crash that puts him in the hospital, Cruise has trouble returning to form. He acts out in ways that jeopardize his career and his love life, though he'd never consider giving up racing just because Kidman knows it could kill him. At one point, Cruise flies into a road rage while she's in the car; she demands to be let out, and threatens to call the police. He tries to defend himself but has nothing to say. "You're selfish, you're crazy, you're scared," she tells him. "Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac." She's right, and we can tell he's absorbed the lesson, because the next scene shows him sitting dejected in a laundromat. Eventually, Tom Cruise gets his act together and wins the Daytona 500. Nicole Kidman had said she wouldn't watch him race, but she lied, and she's there to kiss him at the finish line. This sets up the dynamic we use to understand their relationship for the rest of the decade: The likable but troubled rascal wins over the serious brain doctor, despite her misgivings, with his smoldering looks and irrepressible charm.

Screengrab via YouTube

The next time we see Tom Cruise meet Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise has just failed to shoot her dad, Cruise's mean landlord, in 1890s Ireland. The gun misfires, nearly blowing Cruise up, at which point the security types who work at Kidman's dad's manor put Cruise in a room to heal, so that he can hear his neck break when they hang him. For reasons that are too complicated to get into, Cruise ends up naked and passed out, with nothing but an upturned bowl covering his privates, which was placed there by Kidman's mean and uptight mother. In a neat reversal of the scene in Days of Thunder, Kidman carefully lifts the bowl and sneaks an extended peek at Cruise's penis while he is unconscious. She clearly likes it.

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Far and Away was released two years after Days of Thunder, in 1992, and is far and away the worst Kidman/Cruise film, mostly because director Ron Howard's brand of family-friendly schmaltz hasn't aged well. Plus, it takes place in 1892; mediocre movies from the 1980s and 90s are usually saved because the viewer can focus on the weird clothes and cool slang of the recent past, but in this case, the weird clothes are costumes and everyone has a fake Irish accent.

You never forget you're watching Tom Cruise.

If Days of Thunder is the story of how Kidman and Cruise came together, Far and Away reads like the couple's retelling of that story. In this case, Cruise is a poor Catholic boy whose "da" has just died, and Kidman is a rich Protestant, and they're united by a rebellious spirit and the idea that a better life can be found in America. Neither of them likes the future that's in store for them in the old country, so they run away to Boston; Nicole Kidman offers to let Tom Cruise accompany her on her passage to America as her servant.

Immediately, their social standing flips. Kidman's fortune, a collection of silver spoons, is stolen, and she's forced to rely on Tom Cruise's street smarts to get by. They pretend to be siblings and share a room in a flophouse while trying to save enough money to move to Oklahoma, where they've heard land is literally being given out.

Filled with sexual tension, Tom Cruise takes up barroom boxing. He's immediately the best Irish boxer in town. Unfortunately, the success goes to his head. Just as he and Kidman are about to admit their love for one another, he lets his ego take over, losing both a key fight to an Italian and the support of the corrupt local politicians. The pair is thrown out into the streets just as a cinematic snow flurry starts. Long story short, they part ways, then eventually run into each other in Oklahoma, at which point Nicole Kidman chooses a life with the flawed-but-exciting Tom Cruise over the safe-and-boring existence she once knew.

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Screengrab via Netflix

We do not see Tom Cruise first meet Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick's 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, their final film together. If the first two films are the story of their union, this is how it fell apart. It opens with a shot of Kidman's ass, followed by a bathroom scene in which they are both dressing for a fancy party thrown by one of Cruise's patients. (He's a doctor now.) From the beginning (Kidman pees, wipes while Cruise gets ready in the mirror; he doesn't glance up when she asks him how she looks), the problems are apparent. In both the film and reality, they've been married for nine years. What happened? How did the most famous couple in the world end up in such a rut?

While mingling at the party, Kidman sees Cruise chatting up two young models. Cruise seems like he's about to take them into a private room, until he's summoned to help the host revive a prostitute who's just overdosed on a speedball. (There's a seamy underbelly to the lives of the rich, we're supposed to realize.) Meanwhile, Kidman is being wooed by a Hungarian man. She tells him she's married but he insists they dance. He asks her what she does. She's Tom Cruise's wife. "I used to manage an art gallery in SoHo," she says; she was once an individual with interests and goals of her own, and not just Tom Cruise's wife. It's clear that both Cruise and Kidman—and really, everyone in the movie—want to fuck around.

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After the party, Cruise and Kidman make out while that "did a bad, bad thing" song plays, but Kidman opens her eyes and looks at the camera in a way that demonstrates her thoughts are elsewhere. The couple smoke pot in their underwear. Kidman brings up the girls Cruise was hitting on at the party; Cruise in turn asks about the Hungarian. The talk turns to fidelity; Kidman gets upset at Cruise for suggesting that men only want to talk to her because she's hot, and for implying he would have sex with other women if he weren't married. "This pot is making you aggressive," he says. "No!" she yells. "It's not the pot. It's you!" (When she laughs hysterically moments later, it suggests that the pot is definitely playing a role.)

Screengrab via Netflix

"Why haven't you ever been jealous about me?" she asks. He tells her it's because he knows she would never do anything to hurt their relationship. After recovering from more hysterical laughter, she tells Tom about a sailor she saw while they were on vacation and contemplated having an affair with. "If he wanted me, even if it was only for one night, I was ready to give up everything. You. My whole fucking future. Everything." Distracted by his hotshot career, Tom Cruise gets, in today's parlance, cucked by Nicole Kidman, some random sailor, and Stanley Kubrick. (Many have speculated that Kubrick made the film to suggest their marriage was on the rocks, or even to end it all together. For her part, Kidman told the Hollywood Reporter in 2012, "People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage, but I don't really think it was…. Stanley wanted us to use our relationship as a supposed reality.") Cruise is shattered, and Nicole Kidman is her own person again.

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Screengrab via Netflix

Cruise goes off into the night, to be further humiliated. A group of jocks call him homophobic slurs and tell him that they "got dumps that are bigger than you." (Here there are echoes of much of the media commentary throughout their relationship, as well as a scene in Days of Thunder, in which the 5'7'' Cruise asks the 5'11'' Kidman how tall she is.) He repeatedly imagines Kidman being ravaged by the anonymous sailor and loving it. He hires a prostitute but doesn't fuck. He goes to the film's famous masked orgy, where he is unmasked and frightened. Again, he doesn't fuck, but he does possibly cause two people to get murdered. He returns home and awakens Kidman from a nightmare in which she had been having sex with first the sailor and later "so many" other men. "I wanted to make fun of you," she tells him, crying. You imagine you are seeing Tom Cruise realize what is happening to his life in real time.

The next day, Cruise tries to make sense of his life, but all his assumptions have collapsed. He's still being haunted by the vision of Kidman in rapture with the naval officer. He tries to find out if he really got those two people killed, and it looks like he did, but then his rich friend tells him it was all staged to keep him from investigating their orgy club. Tom Cruise doesn't know what to believe. The people he thought were his friends, the woman he thought would love him always—nothing's certain and there's no one he can trust. He returns home and finds Kidman sleeping next to the mask he wore to the orgy.

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Do rich people orgy clubs really exist? It seems like the masks would get in the way of mouth stuff. Regardless, Tom Cruise breaks down. "I'll tell you everything," he cries. In the next scene, it is morning and they have been talking all night; you can tell it's stressful because Kidman is smoking a cigarette. Cruise asks Kidman what they should do about their relationship. "Maybe I think we should be grateful that we've to survived through all of our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream…" she says. "The important thing is, we're awake now, and hopefully for a long time to come." Tom Cruise responds: "Forever."

We want this to be a story of love almost lost but ultimately saved. Instead, the film basically ends with Kidman reminding us of what we feel we know is inevitable: "Let's not use that word. It frightens me."

Except, of course, we don't know at all. Just as I have no idea if Tom Cruise was an exciting but difficult person to live with, there's no way to know if Kidman was already aware of their imminent divorce when she acted that scene. Or if she was initially attracted to Cruise's magnetic personality, with that huge grin and hair that's begging to be mussed. I could try to find out what really happened, but it doesn't matter that much to me. Besides, celebrity gossip is notoriously unreliable. I would only trust the stories that tell me what I already believe.