Stanley Kubrick wanted Woody Allen or Bill Murray for Eyes Wide Shut role instead of Tom Cruise, new book reveals

Famed filmmaker wanted to cast an actor with ‘a comedian’s resilience’

Stanley Kubrick originally wanted Woody Allen, Steve Martin or Bill Murray for the leading role in Eyes Wide Shut, a new book has revealed.

The 1999 erotic drama starred Tom Cruise as a cuckolded psychiatrist who embarks on a sexual odyssey after he discovers his wife, played by Cruise’s then-wife Nicole Kidman, is having an affair.

Kubrick adapted the film from a 1926 novella titled Dream Story, by author Arthur Schnitzler, and had been developing the project for almost three decades before it was finally made.

In Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker, a new biography on the late director by David Mikics, it is revealed that Cruise was not what Kubrick originally had in mind for the starring role.

"In the Seventies, [Kubrick] fantasised about casting an actor in Dream Story who would have a comedian’s resilience, imagining Steve Martin or Woody Allen in the leading role,” Mikics writes.

He continues: “In a notebook from the Eighties he listed a series of possible leading men, including Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Alan Alda, Albert Brooks, Bill Murray, Tom Hanks and Sam Shepherd????’

“Significantly, when Kubrick finally made his version of Dream Story, he cast an actor without a comic bone in his body, the earnest, highly deliberate Tom Cruise. Comedy would have been a weapon for the hero’s self-defence; Kubrick makes him, in the end, defenceless.”

Eyes Wide Shut drew significant media attention while it was shot, and upon its release. Due to Kubrick’s notorious perfectionism, the film took a year and a half to complete.

Kubrick edited the film over the course of eight months and died six days after showing Cruise and Kidman his finished cut of the film.

Stanley Kubrick: An American Filmmaker will be released on 13 October by Yale University Press.