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Nicole Kidman opened the floodgates last week when she made a rare mention of her marriage to Tom Cruise in an essay forNew York Magazine.
In it, the actress and mother of four revealed that she felt her proximity to the movie star shielded her from unwanted sexual advances in the industry.
“I married for love, but being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being sexually harassed," she wrote. "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."
Kidman, 51, who’s currently promoting her upcoming film, Boy Erased, stopped by The Today Show on Monday morning to discuss the project — and, also, clarify her quotes about Cruise.
“Because I was married at 23 years old, I wasn’t going to parties, I wasn’t going out a lot. I was pretty much at home,” the Oscar winner told Today’s Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie. “I had my first child at 25 and I was in a family, so my sense of being in the world was I was working or I was at home.”
Though her surroundings didn’t put her at as great a risk as other women in her industry, Kidman still felt that Cruise’s status kept her safe.
“But when I say protection, there’s almost like a barrier,” she explained. “A lot of women don’t have that. A lot of people in the world don’t have that.”
Reiterating what she’d laid out in the essay, Nicole told her hosts she still isn’t eager to open up about her first marriage.
“I also don’t like discussing exes and all of that because I’m very happily married, I have two little girls, and I feel it’s almost disrespectful, one, to Tom, and disrespectful to Keith,” she said. “So I try to stay in the here and now.”
As for “the here and now,” Boy Erased opens in select theaters nationwide on Nov. 2.
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