Nicole Kidman on Being Madly ‘In Love’ with Ex Tom Cruise

Long before she became one of Hollywood's most decorated leading ladies, Nicole Kidman was a young woman head-over-heels in love — career consequences be damned.

Nicole Kidman is opening up about just how deeply in love she fell with Tom Cruise in her early 20s — even willing to let it derail her career. The "Babygirl" star discussed the early days of her marriage to the actor in a new interview.

Nicole Kidman attends Paramount+'s "Lioness" Season 3 New York Premiere at SVA Theater on July 29, 2026. | Source: Getty Images

"I got married so young," Kidman told British Vogue in an interview published earlier this week. "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." Kidman says she was warned that her relationship with the "Mission Impossible" star could've changed the trajectory of her career — and she didn't care.

"I remember people saying to me, 'OK, well this is really going to affect your career,'" Kidman recalled. "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,'" she continued. Despite the warnings, the Oscar winner never actually threw her career away.

If anything, she's built a reputation for staying booked and busy year after year. "I just think there are some people who are wired to work," Kidman explained. "I just am." She also acknowledged that her marriage to Cruise taught her how to navigate fame with ease.

"Strangely enough, I feel comfortable. Is that weird? That's so weird," she joked of her relationship to fame. "But you have to remember literally, because of who I married at such a young age, I was thrust into it since I was 22."

"[My life has been] more time like that than not," she said of being in the spotlight. "My memory of it not being that is quite blurry, because I was really young." Kidman and Cruise were married from 1990 to 2001.

The former couple share two adult children, Bella, 33, and Connor, 31, whom they adopted together. Kidman later remarried country star Keith Urban in 2006, welcoming two more daughters, Sunday Rose, 18, and Faith Margaret, 15.

Unfortunately, that marriage also came to an end, with the pair splitting in 2025 after 19 years together. Their divorce was finalized at the start of this year, in January 2026. Kidman addressed the breakup during her sit-down with British Vogue.

While she declined to dive into specifics about the split, she did open up about how she's moving through this new stage of her life, revealing that she's always leaned into a "feelings-first" mindset, both in her career and personal relationships.

"My desire is not to be ruled by my head," she explained. "I've always wanted to live a well-examined life, so what does that entail? Trying things, making mistakes, failing, getting back up, moving on, embracing love, staying open, keeping the heart open and the possibilities."

"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."

When asked whether the uncertainty felt frightening, she responded, "There was 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.'"