Nicole Kidman is opening up about her high-profile divorces from Tom Cruise and Keith Urban. In a new profile in British Vogue, the actress offered some uncharacteristic clarity on her private life, while doubling-down on her determination to keep the needs of her children front and center.
When asked to compare the two divorces, Kidman, who split from Cruise in 2001 after a decade together and finalized her divorce from country star Urban in January, said, “It’s all new … every time!” As for whether she had any fresh intel to share about how to keep your chin up after going through two very public breakups, Kidman reiterated what she and Urban said when they called it quits: family comes first.
“It’s an extraordinary purpose. Everything else is not important,” she said of raising children. “These kids now, that’s what we drop everything for.” The key takeaway, she said, “‘It’s OK, we’re here. You’ve got people who love you, who are going to hold your hand and get through it.’”
Kidman and Urban share two daughters, Sunday Rose, 18, and Faith Margaret, 15 and she also has two children from her marriage to Cruise, daughter Bella, 33, and son Connor, 31.
She copped to this being a difficult year, recalling thinking, “‘OK, I didn’t expect this. I had a different view of what my life was going to be, but this is what it is now.’ You make all these plans and you have all these ideas of what it’s all going to be like and then it’s… not. You have to adjust. You adapt. The future, it’s completely unknown to me right now.”
Though Kidman rarely talks about her time with Cruise, the 59-year-old actress offered, “Yeah, I got married so young. Suddenly I was 22, 23 years old and I had this huge movie star husband. But it just seemed completely natural. We just fell madly in love and it was that simple,” she said. “I remember people saying to me, ‘OK, well this is really going to affect your career.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t care. I’m in love. I want to be married.’ And then I was his ‘wife’ and they were like, ‘See, we told you.’ I’m like, ‘So what? I wasn’t meant to marry the man I love? Of course I’ll throw my career away. I don’t care.’”
Kidman was less forthcoming about her recent break from Urban, describing, “A point where I was very fearful and deeply vulnerable, which is exposing. And then at the same time [I’m] going, ‘Well, I can either really not confront it and just curl up, or I can just go forward with an enormous amount of hope.’”
Kidman filed for divorce from Urban in September and when asked to sum up how she’s feeling now, the actress used the phrases “free falling,” “jumping off” and, after a pause, suggested, “Like, where am I going? And what’s next?”
One place she’s going for sure is a return in the fall to a fan-favorite role in the upcoming sequel Practical Magic 2. She’ll reteam with co-star and pal Sandra Bullock for that one, but Kidman also counts herself lucky that she has many other strong women around her to help deal with life’s unexpected curveballs.
As an example, she recently befriended Charli xcx and the singer had nothing but the highest praise for the tireless, tenacious TV and film icon. “She’s one of our last truly legendary movie stars,” Charli texted the magazine. “She came to my show in New York when I was on the Brat tour. I couldn’t believe she came. Like, the Nicole Kidman is at my show… what the f–k?”
