"Now I can wear tacos," Nicole Kidman told David Letterman days after splitting from Tom Cruise. The presence of the actors on the red carpet of The Others without kisses or heated hugs was the confirmation that was missing: Tom and Nicole were divorced.
The beginning of the twenty-first century coincided with the beginning of the dissolution of the most glamorous marriage in the world. In 2001, the protagonists of Days of Thunder broke up after eleven years of marriage.
No one expected it. The news did not immediately transpire. They did not even disclose their motives. From one day to the next, two of Hollywood's top figures decided to continue their journey separately.
They were the most relevant marriage in Hollywood in the nineties. Photo: REUTERS
That the love story of the decade has ended in the purest secrecy gave rise to speculations of all kinds. From the day the news broke, countless theories emerged – one more delusional than the other – that tried to explain the causes of the divorce.
We anticipate it: this article does not promise any certainty. No one knows what particular event wrote the end point of the romance. What we do assure you is that of all the theories that we will list below, the last one is worthy of a Hollywood movie. If you don't know anything, don't cheat: don't google apart.
I: Nicole and Tom
Both were pierced by a certain crush of Cupid. They met on the set of Days of Thunder, where he plays the seductive car driver Cole and she plays Dr. Claire. Cruise was in his thirties; Kidman was just in her early twenties.
Nicole first saw Tom from an office window as he stepped out of his Porsche and was immediately subjugated by his beauty. "Wow, this man can't be real," says the legend he exclaimed to himself at the time. The presence of the superstar deconcentrated her so much that she did very badly the casting for Tony Scott's film for that reason.
This is what his characters looked like in "Days of Thunder."
We say that the mythological being acted accurately because a few months after finishing the filming of Days of Thunder they got married. It was December 24, 1990, a few hours before Christmas, in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. He was 28; she, 23.
The lives of both changed completely: Tom ended up separating from his ex-wife, actress Mimi Rogers, and Nicole became famous in the Hollywood world. When Cruise met Kidman he was still married to the woman who initiated him into Scientology. Nicole, on the other hand, had just arrived from Australia and was not such a well-known actress.
During the first months of marriage, the actress already wanted to take the next step: She was "desperate" to have a baby with Tom, she told Vanity Fair in a 2002 interview.
Nicole and Tom went to almost every red carpet in their movies together. Photo: AP
Having trouble conceiving — Kidman suffered an ectopic pregnancy and a traumatic miscarriage — the couple adopted two children: Isabella Jane in 1992 and Connor Antony in 1995. With the arrival of the little ones, the actors became flesh and blood, a couple completely dependent on themselves.
First theory: Eyes tightly closed
After starring in the forgettable A Distant Horizon (1992), Tom and Nicole returned to act together in Eyes Wide Closed. Their complex participation in Stanley Kubrick's latest film coincided with the end of their relationship. That is why there are those who say that the experience on the set of the maniacal director was decisive when signing the divorce.
Cruise and Kidman had signed contracts until the end of their work. This brought them under Kubrick's wing from November 1996 to June 1998, in what was the longest shoot in film history.
The protagonists were obsessed with the project to such an extent that, as they had moved to the United Kingdom for filming, their children ended up speaking with an English accent.
His twisted characters in Stanley Kubrick's final film "Eyes Wide Shut."
Eyes Wide Closed, moreover, was nothing darker: it is about the immersion of an apparently exemplary couple in the underworld of sexual sects and street sex.
From the film's subject matter, Kubrick is said to have obsessively directed the couple during the sex scenes; that forced them to visit cabarets; who asked them to attend special psychoanalysis sessions with him.
The maelstrom and wear produced by the filming made a dent in the couple, who would have taken advantage of the therapy sessions with Kubrick to confess their discomfort as a marriage.
Alice Harford, Nicole's character in "Eyes Wide Shut," was Cruise's partner in fiction.
Second theory: Infidelity
Another theory – a little weaker – that at the time managed to settle is the one that says that Tom cheated on Nicole with the actress Penélope Cruz.
In 2000, Cruise filmed Vanilla Sky with the Spaniard and, as had happened to him almost a decade earlier in Days of Thunder, it was said that he fell in love with his film partner. And times are confusing, there are some overlaps: By 2000, Cruise and Kidman were supposedly estranged, but not divorced.
At the time, an anonymous source close to Nicole revealed – according to ABC News – that when the Australian learned of her husband's alleged deception she went "into shock". Cruise would have sworn that nothing happened between him and Cruz, but doubts settled in Kidman, who lately felt distant to Tom. Everything was closing.
Cruise and Cruz dated for at least three years. They were the sensation couple of the early 2000s. Photo: AP
Cruz denied everything. In 2008, the actress told The Telegraph that she waited for Tom to divorce to see if something started with him. While Cruise confessed that he was attracted to her on set, he also denied dating her while filming.
Third theory: Scientology
Scientology is the theory with the most adherents. And it goes like this: the marriage was finally worn down by the influence of Scientology on Tom. Nicole was not willing to renounce Catholicism to follow her husband's particular beliefs and those differences would have reverberated in the couple.
Kidman also did not want to intervene in her children's life decisions and so she lost contact with them: the children she had adopted followed their father's religious path.
According to the Oxford dictionary, "Scientology is a religious doctrine developed by the American Lafayette Ron Hubbard in 1950 and spread through a sectarian organization, which seeks happiness through the understanding of oneself and others as spiritual beings."
Mike Rinder's book, "A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology," delved into Tom's interest in Scientology and how the church would have distanced him from his wife for good.
Tom and Nicole divorced in 2001. Photo: AP
Rinder says that Tom denied during the filming of Eyes Wide Closed the calls of the leader of the church, David Miscavige, but that he, while the actor was filming the film, devised a strategy to bring him back to Scientology. Recall that by his former Scientologist wife, Tom had already been involved in the universe of this belief.
As filming progressed, Tom gradually returned to Miscavige Church. As he did so, he drifted away from Nicole, who didn't want to know that kind of faith at all. The actress's father was a psychiatrist and Scientology disapproves of psychiatry as "inadequate" and for producing in patients an excessive "dependence" on medications.
Rinder hinted that everything got the worse when the church tapped Nicole's phone through a private investigator named Anthony Pellicano.
It is also worth exposing the version of Scientology, which, through a spokesman, denied having spied on Kidman: "The Church never ordered or participated in any illegal telephone tapping. Mike Rinder is an inveterate liar who seeks to profit from his dishonesty. He keeps orchestrating the harassment of his former Church and its leader through false police reports, incendiary propaganda, and fraudulent stories in the media."
In the book, Rinder says members of Scientology referred to Nicole as "SP" for "repressive person," a way the church has to call people to avoid yes or yes. In fact, in 2016 actress and former Scientologist Leah Remini said that one day Kidman's daughter referred to her mother as "fucking SP."
When the marriage ended, Miscavige was glad that Cruise was definitely moving away from Nicole's "negative influence" and could finally express himself as one of the most popular voices in his church.
Fourth theory: jealousy of Lady Di
Believe it or not, there are still those who think that Princess Diana had something to do with this case.
The couple with Lady Di (right), whom they met in 1992 at press events. Photo: AP
A stylist of Lady Di says in Judy Wade's book of anecdotes, "Diana: The Intimate Portrait", that the princess – who was recently separated and had met Cruise at the premiere of A Distant Horizon, precisely the film that Tom stars in with Nicole – flirted with the actor.
This, according to Wade's book, caused jealousy in Kidman. Wade wrote, "She (Nicole) kept shooting... hostile looks as if to say, 'Take my man's hands off!'"
However, even though they say that Tom and Diana did indeed want to have something, it all ended in nothing because Lady Di was not convinced that Cruise was so short.
Beyond these episodes – which could have happened but also could never have happened – in 1997 Kidman and Cruise attended the funeral of the princess as a couple.
Nicole and Tom's divorce remains a mystery.
And so we come to the end, with four theories of more or less support that fed the press for years. Do you keep any?
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