(Credit: Alamy)

Some legacies are curated. Others are forced onto people. And then there’s Eyes Wide Shut, a film that has, for better or worse, been permanently glued to the name of Nicole Kidman, whether she likes it or not. It is not that she disowns the movie. It’s that she resents what the world decided it stood for.

When Stanley Kubrick’s final film was released in 1999, the media did not just dissect the plot or his stylistic choices. They dissected Kidman’s marriage. Her body. Her performance. And they did it in that cruel, backhanded way that says, “We’re analysing the art,” but is just voyeurism in a different outfit. For a film about sexual repression, emotional disconnection, and surreal unravelling, the irony is that its real-life aftermath played out like a tabloid soap opera.

Nicole has spoken candidly since then, not to erase the experience, but to clarify it. She insists her marriage to Tom Cruise was not falling apart during filming, despite what tabloids would later suggest. “We were happily married through that,” she once said. And it matters that she said that. Because for years, people viewed Eyes Wide Shut not as a psychological drama but as some kind of cinematic autopsy of their relationship.

The truth? It was not a dying marriage on display. It was Kubrick pushing boundaries, both theirs and his own. The 15-month shoot was gruelling, obsessive, and emotionally draining. But Nicole Kidman has often called it a creatively rich period of her life. She has described late-night conversations with Kubrick that veered into philosophy, art, and even her vulnerabilities. He was not just directing her. He was trying to excavate something deeper. And she was game. But she didn’t sign up for her private life to become cultural shorthand for “troubled marriage in decline”.

It is the mislabeling of the flattened, headline-ready version of her reality that seems to bother her most. She has said she remembers the film fondly, that it was not some dark, traumatic chapter. They lived on set with their kids. They raced go-karts in between shoots. There was intimacy, laughter, and real partnership even in the middle of filming emotionally intense scenes.

But none of that fits the sexy, tragic narrative people want to believe. And so the myth endured: that Eyes Wide Shut was a mirror to a collapsing relationship, that Kidman was revealing her soul unknowingly, and that Kubrick orchestrated some kind of final cinematic exorcism.

Nicole Kidman is not asking people to forget the film. She is proud of it – the performance, the endurance, and the artistry. But she’s asking us to reconsider the lens we view it through. It was not a breakdown. It was a breakthrough. What doesn’t sit right with her is not the movie. It is the legacy built by people who were not in the room.

Eyes Wide Shut is now streaming on Netflix. Watch it not for the gossip, but for the performance that still lingers decades later.