The one actor so famous it frightened Stanley Kubrick: “It was terrifying”
During his lifetime, he was undoubtedly one of the most famous and vaunted names in the world of cinema, but in the broadest sense of the term, Stanley Kubrick wasn’t famous.
Sure, cinephiles the world over fawned over his every move, and he was an almost deified presence among the majority of his peers, contemporaries, and generational successors, but he wasn’t the sort of Hollywood figure who’d be hounded by the paparazzi everywhere they went to be splashed on the front of the tabloids.
Kubrick wasn’t even all that keen on leaving his house unless he really had to, and the thought of being followed by a baying mob desperate just to catch a glimpse of him was one aspect of the industry he had absolutely no interest in. Fortunately, he managed to live out his days that way.
The legendary auteur worked with some of the finest actors in the business and called many iconic directors acquaintances and even friends, but nothing could have prepared him for the maelstrom of madness he walked into when he enlisted Tom Cruise to play the lead role in Eyes Wide Shut.
The A-lister has been one of the most famous people on the planet since the 1980s, so he’s gotten about as used to that life as he possibly can. Kubrick, on the other hand, was terrified. Shooting on Eyes Wide Shut rumbled on for well over a year, so the filmmaker gained a first-hand view of what being Tom Cruise is all about, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Speaking to the British Film Institute, Kubrick’s daughter Katharina offered an example of how far apart the director and star were in the glare of the public eye. “One day, he came back from Marks & Spencer and said, ‘Someone recognised me,'” she recalled. “‘I didn’t know what to do, and they asked me for my autograph’. He was very surprised.”
Cruise, meanwhile, probably hasn’t done his own shopping for decades. Kubrick’s wife Christiane called him “literally a prisoner of the Midas touch” before Katharina detailed how it ended up impacting the meticulous maverick’s plans to shoot his movie uninterrupted.
“There’s a scene in Eyes Wide Shut where Tom had to walk into a hospital, this was in London,” she said. “Word got around, and within half an hour, the police were having to put up cordons, and people kept ruining the shot by shouting, ‘Tom, I love you.'”
As Christiane remembers it, “Stanley watched it from the car and said it was just terrifying,” with the director of the film too frightened to even emerge from his vehicle and approach his own set because Cruise had done nothing more than show up for a day at work that happened to be in full view of the public.
