On screen and off, Kate Hudson is a cappuccino of warmth and froth. She looks
me up and down for one intense second, and then proceeds with a faltering
intimacy. Her face is babyishly pretty, a contrast to her energy, which
seems unstoppably self-assured.
It will become apparent that there are many contradictions. For now, we talk
about hair, sex and death. Lots about sex.
She refers a couple of times to how we are all “animals, emotionally and
physically”. She has a strong sexual current, yet she’s oddly motherly. She
never believed in monogamy, but she believed in love. She married the Black
Crowes singer, Chris Robinson, when she was 22, seven years ago, and
divorced him in October last year. They have a child, Ryder, now four. It’s
curious that her first venture as a producer is a film about getting married
when she is so newly divorced. It’s taken a long time for this 29-year-old
to shake off the prefix of “Goldie Hawn’s daughter”. Though she’s
transcended all that, when you meet her there’s such a striking resemblance
to her mother you can’t help being reminded that she is her mother’s
daughter: quirky, smiley, feisty, with perfect comedy timing.
She became famous for Almost Famous, which earned her an Oscar nomination and
a Golden Globe win for her portrayal of the groupie Penny Lane in Cameron
Crowe’s semi-autobiographical rock’n’roll movie. Her on-screen chemistry
with Matthew McConaughey topped the box office twice with How to Lose a Guy
in 10 Days and Fool’s Gold, in both of which she mastered a combination of
gutsy and vulnerable that was incredibly winning. Then she became more
famous for her personal life. Soon after she and Robinson split up she had
an affair with the actor Owen Wilson, whom she met on the set of You, Me and
Dupree. He was reportedly devastated when, after they split, he discovered
she was dating the comedian Dax Shepard. Rather cruelly, the tabloids tried
to say that he’d attempted to kill himself because of this devastation.
Hudson emerges in our time together as a person who would never want to hurt
anybody. Not only is she still close friends with Wilson and Robinson, but
she says: “I still love everybody that I’ve ever had a relationship with. I
am friends with them all.”
I met Wilson a few years ago. At that time he seemed uneasy in his own skin,
fidgety and troubled. He talked about going to a strict Catholic boys’
school, then military school and how that affected the way he related to
women. He bemoaned: “I think I’ve been a better friend than boyfriend.”
Hudson, with her verve and infectious charm, certainly would have lightened
him, would have made him feel at ease with himself. You can’t imagine,
though, that it would have been a flippant affair. Hudson seems to be
constantly filled with soaring emotions. Does she fall in love easily? “Fall
in love easily?” she repeats the question, balancing it, weighing it up. “I
am a heart person. The answer is yes, but I don’t mean that in a negative
way. Even if I don’t want to be with somebody, I love them. I don’t have to
be with somebody to love them.”
Is that how you feel about Chris now, that you still love him? “When I met
Chris it was like nothing else. I had no question that I was going to have a
kid with him. Every rule went out the window. We were telling each other we
loved each other by the fourth day and I moved in within a week. I had no
question that we were going to get married.”
Even though she’d already said she didn’t believe in monogamy? She shrugs. “I
just had no question about him, and I still don’t. He’s a permanent fixture
in my life, but I believe our love changed its form, it shifted. I don’t
think we were meant to be married, but I think we were meant to have a
child, and we have this amazing little boy together and therefore we’ll be
together our entire lives. Whoever he ends up with, whoever I end up with,
we’ll always be together.”
She sips her Starbucks coffee. You get the impression she’s read a lot about
love, has done the therapy. Her upbringing was fairly progressive. Her
parents would talk openly to her about sex. “Every relationship is not
easy,” she says emphatically. “Your intention might be in the right place...
I got into this very controversial thing once with Access Hollywood [a TV
entertainment show]. I was married at the time, and I was asked, ‘Do you
think monogamy is possible?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t think we’re made up to
be monogamous: we are animals.’ So I would be doing myself a disservice by
saying monogamy is going to be easy. That said, I could never be in a
relationship that wasn’t monogamous… because I don’t know how to… I couldn’t
deal with it. There is something sacred about the relationship that is
broken. If we are going to try to go down this monogamy path, let’s just
know it’s hard, because when you start hurting people and cheating, that is
so mean.”
She screws up her eyes for extra emphasis. You can tell it’s something she
puzzles over quite a lot. She doesn’t think monogamy is possible, yet she
can’t have a relationship that isn’t monogamous. She doesn’t think when she
gets older, things would necessarily be easier. “If you have that
personality, it’s never going to go away because you are ruled by your
sexual energy. There are people who are ruled by that force and other people
who are head people, but that’s not me. You have to remember not hurting
people comes first. Let go of your ego and your desire.
“It’s complicated, but you have to sort things out and be honest with the
other person, and you are giving the other person the opportunity to say
they can’t do that or you can’t do that. Sometimes people have a hard time
confronting things and being honest about them. I don’t have difficulty with
that.” Yes, I can see that. She laughs a big gurgling laugh.
“I’m not just talking about feeling a little gushy. I feel like being honest
makes for better relationships whether you continue it as a love
relationship or not. I am friends with everyone I have ever been with,” she
says again, earnestly.
This idea of confronting emotions before they confront you seems to have been
set from an early age. “We were the ‘family meeting’ type of a family. It
was like, Ollie [her brother] and I are having problems, so then the whole
family are going to talk about it. And both Oliver and I would end up being
told about all the things that nobody liked about either one of us. So the
next thing you know, what we thought was about Oliver and me became a ‘let’s
tell the truth about how we all feel about this part of you, Kate, and this
part of you, Oliver’. And then it would go on, ‘Mom, this is how I feel
about you.’ And the next thing you know you are all talking about things
that are difficult to talk about and all crying and getting upset and mad,
and then you are done.
“Then you get to this place where everybody is hugging each other saying, ‘I
love you,’ and you walk away from it knowing that talking about it was the
best thing.” She recalls a childhood that smelt of tuberose, honeysuckle and
musk, her mother’s smell. Earthy and sexy.
It sounds as if it was a California encounter group every time they sat down
to dinner. The table would have consisted of Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, whom
she calls Pa, her brother, Oliver, and her half-brother, Wyatt, from her
mother’s relationship with Russell. Her biological father, the musician Bill
Hudson, divorced Goldie when Kate was only a few months old and, growing up,
she had almost nothing to do with him.
Much has been made of the fact that Kate married a rock musician 13 years her
senior and that she seems to gravitate towards older men.
It seems she was looking for daddy in all the wrong places. She has said in
the past that the absence of her father meant part of her was missing, and
she has attempted to get to know him, but they are not close. She is very
close to Russell and her mother. One gets the impression that Hudson has
talked about every emotion she’s ever experienced, even if she has come to
contradictory conclusions about love and relationships. One thing that
strikes me is that there’s no shred of bitterness, no heavy regrets. She
laughs a lot.
Hudson seems too much of a hippie to have ever been a bridezilla, like her
character Liv in Bride Wars, competitively obsessing over every detail. So
what kind of a bride was she? “Ha. I definitely got the dress. I was a young
bride and I wanted to do the big gown and be the big princess — I had a Vera
Wang.” Did she turn into a different person when planning her wedding? “I
didn’t even think about it till the day, and then I surrendered to the whole
thing. I wanted a fire pit because we did a Native American ceremony, so we
built the fire pit in the back yard. We didn’t send out invites, we sent out
this weird psychedelic footage of Chris and I just being weird to music and
just told them to come round. They didn’t know we were getting married. So
we weren’t really putting a big party on. We just wanted our family there.
We all went out and ate and went to bars for a week and had a great time,
and then we got married and partied again.
“I was a beer bride. I don’t have one picture of me without a beer in my hand.
It was a great wedding… and an amazing divorce.” She laughs one of those
whooping gust-of-life laughs.
“So it all worked out fine.” The irony of being a romantic-comedy heroine is
not lost on her.
In Bride Wars she plays a driven lawyer with a curiously determined long bob
(“ambitious hair”). Her character always gets what she wants. She wants a
multi-carat engagement ring and a wedding at the Plaza. But when her best
friend books her wedding at the same place and same time, the dynamic of
their relationship changes.
Hudson’s character, Liv, has established her role as the leader, and Anne
Hathaway’s character, Emma, is the follower, the compliant one. “I framed my
character around Miss Piggy. There’s something about Liv that’s very
high-energy, ambitious, she says whatever she feels, kind of thing.” So she
is like her? She gasps and then slowly gurgles into a laugh, realising this
demanding, ambitious, emotionally volatile woman might be more like her than
she’d like. “There’s actually quite a bit of her and me that are similar.
I’m definitely ambitious. I think ambition can be taken negatively and I
would like to think I’m positively ambitious. I am an Aries, so if I have my
mind on something I am determined to do it. But they say if you are an Aries
you start a project and then never finish it, and that’s also kind of true.”
How did she become involved as a producer on the project? “It was a pitch that
came to our production company about five years ago and it came as a much
darker comedy, more mean. In fact, it was very mean. But when we developed
it, it went through different incarnations, and I wanted it to be a story
about friendship more than anything else. At one point the script was really
out there. To me, it didn’t feel right. I would rather make something that
is not as cutting edge for my first movie as a producer because I’d rather
make a movie that means something to girls and sends a different message. We
need people out there to support us and help us through everything.”
It strikes me as typical Hudson. She wouldn’t have the heart to be purposely
mean. She tells me how much she cried when she saw the Sex and the City
movie, and that with Bride Wars she was going for a similar
cry-as-much-as-you-like, feelgood movie where the romance was secondary to
the friendship. “I have a core group of friends. My own Sex and the City.”
And which is she? “A mix between Samantha and Carrie.”
Her fiancé in the film is particularly adoring and lets her behave as crazily
as she wants.
In real life, is that the kind of dynamic that works for her? She laughs,
perhaps a little nervously.
“I like our dynamic in the movie. He accepted me as who I was and that’s
really important.
Do I think it’s possible to always be accepted? Hmm, I think you go through
cycles. You watch people that have been married for ever go through cycles.
Sometimes you make it through; sometimes you don’t. But hopefully you can
let go of your ego, your pride, if you want it to work.
“I mean my parents, they are married, basically [they’ve lived together for
three decades], and I see how accepting they are of each other’s space. I’ve
seen them and my friends go through all kinds of things and then they fall
in love with each other over and over again. It’s miraculous.”
She smiles, but a little sadly, because that didn’t happen to her. Did it?
“Well, I am divorced,” she says, trying not to stay sad, and moves brightly
on. “I haven’t met the right one yet. And that doesn’t mean you don’t love
those people who are so important in your life. You take all of those things
with you and then you’re with the next person. You’ve learnt a lot,” she
pauses, “hopefully.”
She looks right at me, unafraid of eye contact and explaining herself. “We are
all searching for those answers, though. You go to self-help sections, it’s
all about relationships. It’s in movies and literature and song. It’s the
most widely accessible topic of humankind. It’s fun to talk about because we
can’t figure it out. It’s like death. We’ll never really know what the
answer is, we just have to try to enjoy it.”
Does she think about death a lot? “Oh yeah, especially when I had Ryder. I
definitely started thinking about it because I just experienced birth. I
experienced the closest thing to death that I am going to experience until I
die. I think about it all the time, death. You have to. I feel like people
forget how impermanent things are.
“I forget all the time and I get wrapped up in stuff, especially when things
get a little spread out, like you’re trying to be the best mum you can be,
trying to have a career, trying to be a friend, trying to be a girlfriend.
You have to go back to that place, wait a minute, bring yourself back, it
doesn’t matter, we’re all going to die. And one day all this will be gone
and what does it mean?”
She doesn’t say this with sadness or heaviness, but with a kind of urgency.
“When you ask yourself what you are afraid of, when you start fearing death,
you think, wait a minute, am I going to die being afraid of this. No. I
would rather die strong and knowing I did it anyway.”
She strikes me as strong, fearless even. What does she fear? “Oh my God, I
have so many weird fears. I used to be afraid of flying. But that’s a
control thing. I want to learn how to fly my own plane, then I’ll have a
little control. Everyone who has done it says you’ll never feel the same way
about flying. My pa, Kurt, is a pilot and I feel fine when I fly with him,
but I want to learn to understand how to do it for myself. I used to be
afraid of scuba-diving until I scuba-dived. I thought, ‘I am just going to
surrender to it.’ I let go. I love those moments because you feel so good
when you realise you’ve done it.”
We refer back to death, but not in a self-help kind of way. “I actually have
to go to a funeral today. My gardener was killed in a drive-by shooting.”
She shakes her head. “Life is fleeting. You never know.” And then she’s
talking with life-affirming passion about her new range of hair products —
they don’t contain chemicals. “My hair needs all the help it can get.” And
then she laughs hysterically. “Hair and death. Those are the really
important things… We are all just animals trying to survive.” She likes to
pull things back to the basics. Specifically, if she was an animal, she’d be
a cat. “A homebody cat that sort of lounges but still likes to play. I used
to have these two white persian cats and I felt like I was a mix between the
two of them.
“I am a homebody person. You’ll hardly see me out. I’ll go to a restaurant or
a mellow bar and have a drink with a friend. I’m not a party girl.” She says
she’s not looking for a boyfriend. “I’ve never looked for it. I’m enjoying
my time alone. If anything, I’m shutting down for a second. I’m into being
at home with my son and working.”
As well as Bride Wars, she recently directed a short film, Cutlass, is
launching her hair range, and has just finished filming Nine, where she
sings and dances along with Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Daniel
Day-Lewis and Marion Cotillard. “It’s very scary. It’s terrifying, but it’s
so much fun. We are all performers and that’s what we do, get terrified and
put it out there. Anyway, it’s just really nice for me right now. I like
boys, I love boys, but I’m having an amazing time and I don’t like the
looking. Some girls like to date, but I don’t.”
We agree that a date can be like an audition and can be false. “How it’s been
for me is, you meet somebody through other people, organically, and you hang
out with them. I have been on dates but they’ve just never worked. I went on
a date once and literally left before we’d even ordered. I was like, what am
I doing here? I can’t sit and have dinner with somebody I don’t really want
to like. I’d rather be with my friends.”
She seems to get a vicarious thrill out of the idea that I should go on a
dating website to experiment. “I think it would be really interesting.
Because there’s one thing I feel, the more you date people throughout your
life, the more you go through relationship ups and downs — you become a
little more jaded, a little more closed off, a little more particular, less
open — and I’m really not interested in doing that.”
You mean one should be open to anything, even a dating website, just for the
experience? She pauses. “The more you go through things and the more
difficult they are, you build up walls. It’s like that idea they talk about,
stripping layers off an onion till you reach your core. But we do the
opposite: instead of stripping the onion we grow this weird coating. So, for
me, I really need to focus on not losing spontaneity. The most important
part of life is to enjoy falling in love, enjoy the heartache, enjoy all of
it.”
She says this is halfway between a prayer and a blessing. But she’s smiling
and she’s laughing, and you feel the warmth of her core emoting out of her,
and you feel its power and you think she doesn’t have those weird layers at
all.
