Nicole Kidman has always had a very particular way of talking about her relationships: she is candid about what she felt, but never seems to need to turn an ex-husband into a villain in order to explain why a story ended.

In 2020, I wrote about that here while looking back at the way she had publicly navigated the end of her marriage to Tom Cruise. Even after a traumatic and unexpected separation, Nicole never rewrote the past to claim it had all been a mistake. She spoke of a happy marriage, a real passion and a man she had been deeply in love with. At the end of that piece, when Nicole was still married to Keith Urban, I raised a question that, I confess, I would have preferred to remain purely theoretical: how would she maintain that same openness if she ever had to talk about another separation? Now we know.

In a long and excellent interview with British Vogue published this week, Nicole speaks with unusual openness about the end of her 19-year marriage to Keith Urban. She does not explain what happened between them, assign blame or offer some dramatic revelation about what went on behind the scenes. Instead, she talks about what happened to her when life stopped following the script she had imagined.

“I had a different view of what my life was going to be,” she admits. Nicole says there was a point when she felt “very fearful and deeply vulnerable,” and that for a while she essentially saw two choices: retreat into herself or keep moving forward with hope. It is an important distinction. She did not explain why the marriage ended. She explained what it means to realize, at 59, that plans that once seemed solid simply no longer exist.

Perhaps that is why the best answer in the entire interview came when the reporter asked whether going through such a public divorce from Tom Cruise in 2001 had given her any useful experience for facing this one. Nicole threw up her hands, laughed and replied: “It’s all new.” When the interviewer pressed her — every time? — she confirmed: “Every time.”

It may sound like a simple line, but it is probably the most honest reflection in the interview. There is no résumé for separation. Surviving the end of one great love does not necessarily teach you how to survive the end of the next.

Tom Cruise reappears in the conversation in a way that confirms exactly the Nicole we have been watching for more than two decades. She was only 22 when they fell in love, and she remembers being warned that marrying a star of that magnitude could damage her own career. Nicole had no interest in that analysis. She was in love and wanted to get married.

“I don’t care. I’m in love. I want to be married,” she remembers thinking. She adds that, at the time, she would even have put her career aside if necessary. It is a remarkable statement not because Nicole Kidman is suggesting women should give up careers for men — her own trajectory has proved precisely the opposite — but because she still refuses to falsify who she was at 22 using the awareness she has at 59.

She loved Tom Cruise, married him because she wanted to, was happy during part of that marriage, and then the relationship ended. One thing does not have to erase the other. In 2020, when she once again addressed rumors that Eyes Wide Shut had contributed to their breakup, Nicole was already doing the same thing. She said people had created that narrative, while her own memory of the period was of a happy marriage. She and Tom would film emotionally devastating scenes with Stanley Kubrick and then go go-karting at three in the morning.

Memory, after all, does not have to obey the ending. Perhaps that is exactly what is most interesting about Nicole when she talks about her marriages: she does not turn the ending into an explanation for everything that came before.

With Keith Urban, she appears to be following the same path. Nicole admits she suffered, felt afraid, and suddenly found herself facing a life that no longer resembled the one she had planned, but she is not offering the public a culprit who would make everything easier to understand. There is even something almost ironic about it. For decades, Nicole Kidman was asked about Tom Cruise as though a divorce had to contain some definitive answer about what that marriage had “really” been. Now, faced with another rupture, she seems to be saying that perhaps relationships simply do not work that way.

Some stories are happy until they are not, some plans work until they stop working, and no amount of experience prevents a new loss from feeling new. Nicole says the future feels completely unknown to her right now. She is traveling, working, spending time with her daughters, going out dancing — sometimes wearing a small dark wig in Ibiza so she will not be recognized — and preparing for the release of Practical Magic 2, once again alongside Sandra Bullock.

But the most interesting image in the interview is not that of the international movie star partying her way through Europe. It is that of a woman admitting that she does not know exactly what comes next. In 2020, I wondered how Nicole Kidman would talk about another separation. Six years later, we have the answer: the same way she has always talked about love, without denying the pain when it ends, but also without destroying what existed simply to make the ending easier to explain.