Twenty-five years after her first Oscar nomination for Almost Famous, Kate Hudson is nominated again — for playing Claire Sardina, a Milwaukee hairdresser turned Neil Diamond tribute performer, in Song Sung Blue. Hudson says the experience is much sweeter this time around.
"I've been comparing it to having my third baby," she says. "You soak in everything very differently."
Hudson landed her role in Song Sung Blue after co-star Hugh Jackman saw her singing and talking about music on CBS' Sunday Morning. Jackman had already committed to the movie and he was so taken by her appearance that he texted director Craig Brewer to recommend her. As soon as she read the script, Hudson knew she wanted to sign on.
"When you read a lot of scripts, and you read the types of characters that are written for women, very rarely do you see ones that hit all the notes," she says. "I got to play the comedy, some sense of humor. I got to play the love story, the desire. I got to play being a mother, and then I got to go into a place of where my life force is taken out of me."
Hudson also gets to sing in the film, which is something she's wanted to do as a recording artist for a long time, but put off because she feared it might derail her acting career. Then the pandemic happened, and she began writing her debut album, Glorious.
Now, as she prepares for the Oscars, she thinks about her mom, Goldie Hawn, who won the award for Best Supporting Actress in 1970 for Cactus Flower. "I look at this Oscar nomination, and I look at my mother, and ... there's this amazing connection that I get to have with my mom at this time. She's 80. I'm 46. How lucky am I that I got to really share that experience with her in that way?"
Interview highlights
On what attracted her to the role of Claire in Song Sung Blue
Part of what's fun about what we get to do is that there's some things we don't understand, and we have to delve into it and try to portray something that seems further away from your real life than maybe other people would think. There's not much about Claire's life that I really would personally be able to understand. The one thing that I do understand about Claire is her longing for love and family, her strong desire for community, and her love of music and her love of singing and performing. So those things I could really relate to. Everything else became about honoring her story, and really trying to portray that as successfully as I could, and respectfully.
On how the COVID pandemic inspired her to pursue music
I was reflecting on if I was going to die, am I happy with my creative output? I'm very happy with myself as a mother. Like, I feel like I've made all the right mistakes and all the wrong mistakes. I feel I've been really great when it comes to parenting. … But I couldn't say that about my art. And that would be my own personal sadness and regret, is that I didn't share my writings as a musician. Whether people like them or not, I just really was not happy with the fact that I wasn't brave enough to put it out there.
On what made filming Almost Famous so special
The whole entire experience of making that film was ... so special for multiple reasons. No. 1, Cameron Crowe is brilliant and an amazing person, an amazing director to work for as an actor. How lucky was I that I got to work with Cameron Crowe so young, on a role that was so layered? It was his life story. … Like Song Sung Blue, there was this very strong intention to get it right for Cameron and everybody was in on it. We all wanted to get it right for Cam. …
It was six months. It was a long shoot. We all got to know each other very well. We had rock school … about a month before we started shooting. The band was learning how to play all the instruments, all the songs. … And the girls were "Band Aids," hanging around … we'd all smoke and live in this alternate universe. … And then the work was intense. It was big set pieces, long days, big crew. So as much fun as we were having, like anything else, it's a job and hard, great work.
On the dumbing down of rom-coms
It's been so dumbed down, we all know it! The rom-com genre is a very hard genre to get right because people see one formula of a rom-com and then they wanna repeat it over and over and over. … But I find, at the end of the day, the ones that have succeeded are the ones that are approached like they're going to be like a critically-acclaimed film. The ones that are really good are good because they're good movies. They hit all of the notes that make you love what that movie is. ... The best ones are things like As Good As It Gets, Sleepless in Seattle. You look at all of the best rom-coms, and they are two very intensely well-written [characters] that are telling a story that we all relate to that's incredibly human. So we need to invest in those.
Ann Marie Baldonado and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Ciera Crawford adapted it for the web.
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