Nicole Kidman Says Marriage to Tom Cruise Protected Her From Sexual Harassment

“I would work, but I was still very much cocooned,” the “Big Little Lies” star says

Tom Cruise Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman has her marriage to Tom Cruise to thank for protecting her from sexual harassment in Hollywood early on in her career, the “Big Little Lies” star said in an as-told-by-her essay published by New York Magazine Tuesday.

“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,” Kidman said, before discussing her decades-old relationship with the actor, whom she met when they were cast in the film “Days of Thunder.” The couple were married on Dec. 24, 1990.

Kidman added: “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.”

The “Destroyer” star adopted two children — a son and a daughter — with Cruise during the course of their 11-year marriage. She is now married to Urban, with whom she shares two daughters.

Kidman revealed in the essay that “of course” she has still had “#MeToo moments” (since she was “little,” even) but doesn’t want to “expose them in an article.”

“Do they come out in my work? Absolutely,” Kidman said. “I’m open and raw. I want to have my well of experience and emotion tapped into, used — and I’m not just talking about sexual harassment. I’m talking about loss, death, the full array of life. But it has to be by the right people so it’s not abused again.”

Kidman is currently working on a film about former Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes with Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie, in which she plays Gretchen Carlson, a journalist who filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the Fox boss in 2016. Carlson received a public apology from 21st Century Fox and was reportedly given a $20 million settlement.

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