The sad truth about celebrity romances is they often end in disaster.

And once a power couple breaks up, their fans are hungry for all the messy details about what went wrong.

Usually, there are tell-all interviews where the jilted exes tell their side of the story.

But it can take years for details about Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise's failed marriages to trickle out.

Which is why his fans are taking notice now that his ex-wife, actress Nicole Kidman, is speaking out about their highly publicized relationship, marriage, and divorce.

"I was consumed by it, willingly. And I was desperate to have a baby with him."

Like so many other Hollywood couples, Kidman and Cruise first met on set, while starring in their NASCAR blockbuster Days of Thunder in 1989.

The actress, who was only 22, admitted she was immediately starstruck by Cruise, 27.

"He basically swept me off my feet," Kidman told Vanity Fair. "I fell madly, passionately in love. And as happens when you fall in love, my whole plan in terms of what I wanted for my life - I was like, 'Forget it. This is it.'"

Kidman wasn't exaggerating: the couple would be married by the next year, and quickly started a family together.

"I was consumed by it, willingly. And I was desperate to have a baby with him. I didn't care if we were married."

While the couple were smitten with each other, Kidman later realized she had put her infatuation with Cruise before everything else in her life.

"I was willing to give up everything," she remembered. "I was reeling with Tom and I loved it and I would have walked to the end of the earth. That meant giving up a lot of things that were very important to me."

"I wasn't there as Nicole"”I was there as Tom's wife."

While the pair became a bona fide power couple, and starred together in films like Far and Away, Kidman felt like she had been pushed into Cruise's shadow during their marriage.

"I felt I didn't deserve to be there in my own right, and so throughout I wasn't there as Nicole"”I was there as Tom's wife," she explained.

But despite their differences, Kidman insists she was stunned when Cruise filed for divorce in 2001, citing "irreconcilable differences."

"I'm starting to understand now," Kidman said about the divorce a year later. "At the time I didn't."

While many insist that Cruise's religion, the controversial Church of Scientology, was at the heart of his split with Kidman, the actress refuses to weigh in on those rumors.

"I want to honor that marriage for what it was, and there is nothing I would go into about that," she told British GQ about the split. "I have never discussed the intricacies of it and I never will."

"Being married to Tom Cruise at 22 is something I'm always reluctant to talk about..."

While Kidman has kept tight-lipped about her decade-long marriage to Cruise, in the last year she has begun to share more details about the relationship.

In an essay about the #MeToo movement published earlier this year, Kidman claimed her marriage to "an extremely powerful man" like Cruise protected her from harassment.

"I married for love, but being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being sexually harassed," she explained.

"I would work, but I was still very much cocooned. So when I came out of it at 32, 33, it's almost like I had to grow up."

Kidman also shed some light on why she's so reluctant to mention her ex-husband in interviews.

"Being married to Tom Cruise at 22 is something I'm always reluctant to talk about, because I'm married now to the man who is my great love, [country singer Keith Urban,] and it almost feels disrespectful."

"I keep wondering: why haven't Katie Holmes or Nicole Kidman spoken out?"

But actress Leah Remini, the former King of Queens star and an outspoken critic of Scientology, had another explanation for Kidman's silence.

"I keep wondering: why haven't Katie Holmes or Nicole Kidman spoken out?" she said in an interview about Scientology with LaPalme magazine. "I assume they were forced to sign prohibitive documents."

Remini also claimed that Cruise's latest ex-wife, Katie Holmes, is "not allowed to have a meal with me, and we used to be close friends. She could lose custody of Suri. It's quite sick, really."

A representative for the church called Remini's claims "ridiculous," but it wasn't the first time  the actress had spoken out about Kidman's divorce.

In her tell-all book Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, Remini suggested that Kidman's adopted children from her marriage to Cruise, Connor and Isabella, are banned from speaking to her because of their religion.

She described speaking to Connor and Isabella after the actor's 2006 marriage to Katie Holmes, when they supposedly said, "Our mom is a ---- SP."

In Scientology, an "SP" or "Suppressive Person" is meant to be shunned by practicing Scientologists.

"When I say 'protection' there is almost like a barrier."

Despite the claim that Kidman is restricted from discussing her marriage to Cruise, the actress has continued to open up about their time together.

On Monday, Kidman cleared up her earlier comments that Cruise had "protected" her from abuse while visiting Today.

"Do you think people were afraid to mess with you, because he was so powerful?" asked host Savannah Guthrie.

"When I say 'protection' there is almost like a barrier," Kidman explained.

"A lot of women don't have that. A lot of people in the world don't have that. But I also don't like discussing exes and all of that," she added.

But Kidman was also quick to shy away from discussing the past.

"I feel it's almost disrespectful... to Tom and disrespectful to Keith. So I try to stay in the here and now."

Whether she's avoiding painful memories or just being respectful, it can't be easy to discuss a divorce so publicly.

So kudos to Kidman for handling her past relationships in such a polite and dignified way.

[H/T: Today]

Were you surprised by what Kidman had to say about her marriage to Cruise?