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Nicole Kidman’s iconic 2001 joke about her divorce from Tom Cruise has resurfaced following her split from second husband Keith Urban.
The viral clip comes from the Big Little Lies actress’ 2001 appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman, where she publicly addressed her split from Cruise, 63, for the first time. (Cruise and Kidman, 58, announced their separation in February 2001 after 10 years of marriage. The former couple share two adopted children: Bella, 32, and Connor, 30.)
Kidman was ostensibly appearing on host David Letterman’s CBS talk show at the time to promote her horror blockbuster The Others, though Letterman started off the interview by peppering her with questions about her split from Cruise.
“You look fantastic. I heard you’re getting divorced. How’s that going?” Letterman, 78, asked Kidman as she sat down for their segment.
Letterman said he was “guessing things were alright or you wouldn’t be here,” to which Kidman replied: “I’d probably still be here.”
Kidman admitted she was getting “a lot of questions” about her divorce, before slyly revealing one upside of splitting from Cruise.
“Well, I can wear heels now,” Kidman joked, seemingly in reference to Cruise’s height.
She then encouraged Letterman, “Let’s move on. Now we move on.”
Later in the interview, Kidman assured the late night icon that she was “fine” before turning the tables and asking: “How was your divorce?”
Letterman was with his first wife, Michelle Cook, from 1968 to 1977 and has been married to his second wife, Regina Lasko, since 2009. (Letterman and Lasko share son Harry, 21.)
Kidman has rarely addressed her split from Cruise since that 2001 appearance with Letterman, though she did famously tell Vanity Fair a year later that she’d been “willing to give up everything” for her marriage.
“I now see that [trait] as part of me. I’m willing to do that — I do it when I do a movie too. I’m willing to go, ‘Yeah, bring it on, consume me, intoxicate me,’” she explained. “I want to feel alive — I want to reel, basically. I was reeling with Tom and I loved it and I would have walked to the end of the earth. That meant giving up a lot of things that were very important to me.”
More recently, Kidman wrote in a 2018 New York Magazine essay that it “almost [felt] disrespectful” to discuss her divorce from Cruise following her 2006 marriage to Urban.
“I got married very young, but it definitely wasn’t power for me — it was protection,” she acknowledged. “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 [the marriage] at 32, 33, it’s almost like I had to grow up.”
In turn, Cruise referred to Kidman as “a great actress” in May 2025 while discussing the grueling filming of their 1999 movie, Eyes Wide Shut, with late director Stanley Kubrick.
Us Weekly reported that Kidman filed for divorce from second husband Urban after 19 years of marriage on Tuesday, September 30. Kidman cited “irreconcilable differences” for the split. The couple agreed for Kidman to be named “primary residential parent” for their two teenage daughters, Sunday, 17, and Faith, 14.
A source exclusively revealed to Us that the former couple have been “quietly separated for a while now” because they “needed time to figure out if they were going to actually divorce.”
“This wasn’t Nicole’s decision, and she is devastated,” the insider explained to Us. “Her trust was lost, and it was too far gone. Nicole had been trying to get them to work on their marriage and did not want this to get out to the public. She didn’t tell many friends what was really going on with them and was holding this in for months.”
Us reached out to both Kidman and Urban for comment.
Kidman was spotted for the first time since filing for divorce on Wednesday, October 1, while exercising and chatting with her sister, Antonia Kidman, in Nashville.
