Eyes Wide Shut: Why did John Turturro pass on the role Stanley Kubrick wrote for him? Actor reveals reason 

John Turturro has revealed that he came remarkably close to working with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut, only to miss the opportunity because of a misunderstanding. According to the actor, Kubrick had directly told him, “I wrote this part for you,” referring to the role of pianist Nick Nightingale, who draws Tom Cruise’s character into the infamous masked ritual. Yet the collaboration never materialized.

The actor explained that after a phone call with Kubrick, he didn’t emphatically confirm his availability, a casual response that Kubrick apparently took as disinterest.

Speaking on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Turturro said,

“I didn’t turn down Stanley Kubrick, but Stanley Kubrick called me up for Eyes Wide Shut, and I was, like, shocked that he knew all about me. And he said, ‘I think you’re a terrific actor,’ and I said, ‘Well, thank you.’ He goes, ‘Well, you are.'I was like, ‘Well, I can’t walk around my house saying that to my wife, she’ll hit me over the head with a frying pan.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m gonna send you a script and I hope you’ll like it.’ He goes, ‘You’ll like it.'”

He then adds how a misunderstanding happened during the conversation, eventually leading to the role being picked by Todd Field.

“He said, ‘I wrote this part for you.’ I didn’t say to him, ‘Whatever it is, I will do.’ But I was so excited. I said, ‘I’ll read it, and we’ll work it out.’ I was talking to him like a normal person. The next day, I heard I was unavailable, because I didn’t tell him: ‘No matter what.’ That’s it, and I didn’t know that at the time, and I just tried to be a regular [person]. So I would have liked to have worked with him just because I’m a big fan of his and see how I would have survived doing long takes.”

More details about Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick’s final puzzle box of a film, a fever dream that drifts between reality and hallucination. On the surface, it’s about marriage, jealousy, and temptation, but underneath it pulses with secrecy, masks, and the power structures that hide in plain sight.

Tom Cruise’s Dr. Bill Harford stumbles into a night-long odyssey after his wife Alice, played by Nicole Kidman, admits to once fantasizing about another man. That confession detonates his sense of control, sending him into New York’s underworld, where intimacy, ritual, and danger blur together.

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Released after Kubrick’s death, the film has only grown more enigmatic, interpreted as everything from a tale of marital fragility to a critique of elite power. Over the years, it has become a cult classic, hailed as one of Kubrick's finest works even to this day.

Eyes Wide Shut is available to stream on Prime Video.

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