After speaking out about Tom Cruise for the first time in years, Nicole Kidman is clarifying the comments she made about her ex-husband protecting her from sexual harassment.
“Because I was married at 23 years old, I wasn’t going to parties or I wasn’t going out a lot. I was pretty much at home,” the actress, now 51, explained on the Today show on Monday, October 22. “I had my first child at 25 and I was a married, I was in a family. So my sense of being in the world was … I was working, or I was at home.”
Kidman and Cruise, 56, were married from 1990 to 2001, and adopted two children together: Isabella, now 25, and Connor, now 23. The “Boy Erased” star made headlines earlier this month for saying the relationship helped keep her safe in Hollywood.
“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,” she wrote in an essay for New York Magazines’ Women and Power issue. “That said, I got married very young, but it definitely wasn’t power for me — it was protection.”
The Big Little Liars star continued: “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 [the marriage] at 32, 33, it’s almost like I had to grow up.”
After Today host Savannah Guthrie quoted her remarks back to her on Monday, Kidman further explained that she felt like there was “a barrier” around her during the marriage.
“When I say ‘protection’ there is almost like a barrier. A lot of women don’t have that. A lot of people in the world don’t have that,” she said. “But I also don’t like discussing exes and all of that … I feel it’s almost disrespectful … to Tom and disrespectful to Keith [Urban]. So I try to stay in the here and now.”
Kidman married Urban in 2006. They share daughters Sunday, 10, and Faith, 7.
