After a week of many of this year’s Oscar contenders being feted at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Kate Hudson sat down for a wide-ranging chat about her career for the fest’s final tribute.
In a Friday night conversation with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, the Song Sung Blue star went all the way back to the beginning, reflecting on being raised in a Hollywood household, and her early breakout — and first Oscar nom — with Almost Famous.
At the 2001 Academy Awards, “I lost, and everything happened so fast. My dad just turned to me — he was down a couple, and Kurt [Russell] just goes, ‘Congratulations, now you can go have a career,’” Hudson told the crowd. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ And that was Kurt’s way of saying, like, ‘Welcome, this is what it is. Everything happens and in a second it’s all over.’”
From there, she would go on to become queen of the rom-com, with How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Bride Wars, Something Borrowed and Fool’s Gold among her hits.
“I think it’s one of the hardest genres to get right,” Hudson said, and needs to be approached “with the intention like everybody does a great film, not with the intention of making a rom-com.” She also spoke about eventually trying to break out and do more with her career after years in that genre.
“It was clear that that’s where the industry liked to hire me and then my goal, my hope, was to make the best versions of those. In that time, it was also like there’s a lot of factors: you’ve got your team, you’ve got people saying, ‘We really think you should do this, these are great directors.’ And then you have moments where you’re also like, ‘That’s a lot of money and I’m a single mom,’” Hudson explained. And despite working with some top filmmakers and making hits, “I was starting to be like, I really want to be doing something different. And I think when you become really famous doing that genre, it’s hard for certain filmmakers to see you in anything other than what we’re watching. These sort of things that like, ‘Well, transforming isn’t what she does’ when, in fact, it’s what I love to do.”
That desire to shake things up also came through in releasing 2024 album Glorious, after years of wanting to do music more seriously.
“I always thought music would be something that I would do, but then it was like, OK, don’t break what’s not broken and this idea of sort of crossover careers could have been a kiss of death. You’re sort of warned against it, like ‘Just enjoy your career, enjoy this part right now,’” Hudson said. When she was in her 30s, she told someone she wanted to make an album “and they’re like, ‘You’re kind of too old now to sort of break out as a musical act or to have a musical career.’”
She acknowledged that “he wasn’t wrong” but “it just weighed on me. And then finally COVID happened and I was like, I will just regret it if I don’t do it. I have to do it,” noting she was doing it for herself and didn’t need it to be successful. “And so I did it, and then I couldn’t believe the reception that it received. It was so warm and loving and loved. And I was like, ‘Why didn’t I do this before?’”
Now with her second Oscar nom, Hudson teased a bit of what she’s looking to do next as the awards attention has created new opportunities. “It doesn’t mean to me that all of a sudden I just want to be doing this for the concept of the accolades; I want to do it to put people in the theater too,” she mused. “This feels like the beginning of maybe that part where I get to do a little bit more transformations than maybe I’ve been able to do in the past.”
To close out the evening, Gwyneth Paltrow made an appearance to present Hudson with the Arlington Artist of the Year Award, calling her “kind of like a little sister to me.”
“We have logged a lot of life together and lived a lot of chapters alongside each other — marriages to musicians, plural. We had our expat years in London, babies and renovating houses. And, oh, her 30th birthday, where I got really drunk. My 40th birthday, where everybody, I think, got really drunk,” Paltrow joked, revealing that their kids were even in a band together. And after she saw Hudson in Song Sung Blue, “I FaceTimed you when I finished and I burst into tears, not only because I was so proud of your skill and your brilliance, but because I felt you finally had a role that shows all of what you can do.”