Why Stanley Kubrick didn’t like working with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman
Across his truly remarkable career, Stanley Kubrick was afforded the opportunity to work with some of the greatest actors of all time, including Jack Nicholson, Malcolm McDowell, Ryan O’Neal and Keir Dullea. In his final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick hired two absolute megastars of Hollywood, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
Cruise and Kidman had been married at the time of filming Eyes Wide Shut, in which they also portray a married couple. The erotic mystery thriller is based on a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler, transposing the story to 1990s New York City, where Cruise’s Dr. Bill Harford infiltrates the masked orgy of a powerful secret society.
No actor in their right mind would turn down the opportunity to work with Kubrick, and both Cruise and Kidman would likely have been delighted when they got the call from the director to say that they’d secured their respective roles. However, even despite the film’s critical and commercial acclaim, Kubrick seemed to have an issue with Cruise and Kidman.
Cruise was an incredibly busy actor in the late 1990s, which meant that he often had to leave the production of Eyes Wide Shut to take care of other projects. However, Kubrick likely felt that Cruise was not fully committed to what would become the director’s final film, which led to him growing frustrated.
Kubrick once spoke of the lack of discipline in some actors who don’t take the time to properly learn their lines, noting, “They cannot act without knowing dialogue. If you have to think about anything when you’re acting you cannot work on the emotion. It’s happened on every film. There’s really not much you can do about it.”
Though the director gained a reputation for excruciating and perfectionist shoots, he had never wanted to reshoot a scene any more than necessary and found that the only time he ever had to was when the acting was not up to his expectations. Kubrick explained, “They never say, ‘Why you did so many takes.’ I don’t do a lot of takes when it’s good.” Cruise and Kidman notoriously had to reshoot several scenes in Eyes Wide Shut, showing that Kubrick was not best pleased with their efforts.
The American actor Ronald Lee Ermey worked with Kubrick on his 1987 Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket and later became friends with the director. According to Ermey, both Cruise and Kidman “had their way” with Kubrick during the production of Eyes Wide Shut, proving an unsettling quality that occurred behind the scenes.
Kubrick also had a distaste for actors discussing scenes away from the camera, but with Eyes Wide Shut, he had to contend with the fact that his two stars were a married couple. When Cruise and Kidman spoke of the intimate scenes that they were to perform, Kubrick grew angry and forbade them from doing so.
Ermey noted, “Stanley called me about two weeks before he died. We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of shit and that he was disgusted with it, and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him – exactly the words he used.”
Evidently, the production of Eyes Wide Shut was a moment where Kubrick felt that he had been used by his actors, who perhaps saw the opportunity to work with one of the greatest directors of all time as a leg up in their respective careers. Of course, Kubrick would die before he got a chance to speak of Cruise, but it looks for all intents and purposes that he would not have called upon the actor to work with him again.