Kate Hudson’s “ultimate” dream role: “I would probably go way too far into that character”
If you’re into rock music, and you’re into films, and let’s face it, that’s a very high number of people around the world, then you would imagine a conversation with Kate Hudson would be fascinating.
Not only has she been in a relationship with Matt Bellamy of Muse and Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes, and has therefore toured extensively with both bands, but she has also released her own album, notwithstanding the movie pedigree, coming from Hollywood royalty as the daughter of Goldie Hawn and singer Bill Hudson and the step-daughter of Kurt Russell.
If that weren’t enough, she of course starred in one of the best, and possibly the actual best, rock movies of all time in the form of 2000’s Almost Famous, the escapist love letter to rock penned by director Cameron Crowe and featuring Hudson as the flighty, endearing, and dreamy groupie Penny Lane. It was her first major role in a movie, and while she might not have had to work too hard to get a foot in the door, she certainly made the most of the movie about the fictional band of Stillwater, earning herself a Golden Globe award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ at the first time of asking.
For the next decade or so, she seemed to concentrate on romantic comedies, with the occasional thriller like 2005’s The Skeleton Key thrown in, but in the main she became known for light-hearted films including You, Me and Dupree with fellow ‘they were everywhere in the mid-2000s’ actor Owen Wilson which made a jaw-dropping $150million in 2006 on a budget of less than $25m.
The next decade was a bit less successful as Hudson appeared in films like serial killer flick The Killer Inside Me and a huge flop opposite Bill Murray called Rock the Kasbah in 2015, in which she played ‘a hooker with a heart of gold’, which is a terrible premise and no wonder nobody watched it.
Things got much better for her at the start of the 2020s however, as she leaned back on music and picked up a second Golden Globe nomination for Music, which was co-written and directed by the pop star Sia, and she also launched her own clothing line, wrote a book and signed a deal with Virgin Records, releasing her first album Glorious in 2024.
Thus, given the choice, when asked by Rolling Stone, if there’s a movie role that Hudson would most ideally like to play, she outlined a truly iconic female rock star who survived one of the most turbulent bands in music history to launch a successful solo career.
She said, The ultimate is Stevie [Nicks]. But my family might, like, disown me if I ever got a chance to play Stevie. ‘Cause they’d be like, ‘Can we not go method?’ I would probably go way too far into that character. I think for all girls who love rock, Stevie’s just our number one. Her whole life experience and the music.”
Although a documentary on Nicks called In Your Dreams, directed by Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, was released in 2013, a biopic of the singer’s life has yet to be realised.
Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac with her then boyfriend, Linsday Buckingham, in 1975, after which the band became one of the biggest-selling acts of all time, but the group were plagued by drug use, in-fighting and complicated relationships, out of which they somehow put Rumours together in 1977, an album that ended up going 21 times platinum in the US.
She was still a member of the band when she launched a solo career in 1981, which proved almost as successful, with her going on to release eight albums and sell more than 65million copies as a solo artist.
Hudson added, “Fleetwood Mac, that whole journey from before Stevie to after Stevie? And her relationship with Lindsey? It’s like a trilogy. There’s so much there. To me, that’s like the ultimate rock and roll story.”
