In 1999, Stanley Kubrick released an erotic thriller starring one of Hollywood’s most famous couples at the time, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. Eva Herzigova declined participation in the film for personal reasons.
Eyes Wide Shut was Kubrick’s final work. In the 1960s, he had acquired the rights to Dream Story, a novella by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. The story follows Bill and Alice Harford, a seemingly happy couple whose peaceful life is disrupted by impulses toward marital infidelity. The film, featuring Kidman and Cruise both on and off screen as a couple, explores the intense passion between two people who love each other as deeply as they destroy one another.
To intensify the drama, Kubrick wanted model Eva Herzigova to appear as a disruptive presence in the narrative. She was offered three significant scenes with the Hollywood stars, but the content of these sequences conflicted with her personal values and aspirations.
Herzigova explained that the role required her to perform three scenes: one involving drug use, another featuring a long and tense conversation with Tom Cruise’s character, and a final moment in which her heroine dies. All of them demanded full nudity. She attempted to negotiate changes or at least soften some of the material, but the requests were denied.
Unwilling to begin her acting career under such conditions, she ultimately chose to walk away from the project.
