The Kurt Russell movie Kate Hudson found extremely difficult to watch: “It brings you way too close”
It’s a feeling many of us can empathise with in one way or another. Watching footage of a loved one out in the world, like a younger family member in a daunting production of school theatre, or a parent giving a toast at a wedding. We might get high on the empathy, figdety, and fizzing with nerves.
But Kate Hudson has been forced to watch her stepfather, Kurt Russell, meet his own demise on film on several occasions, a fate worse than any cringeworthy wedding speech might be.
Russell, the 74-year-old actor known for his work in Tombstone and Tango & Cash, though boasting a long and impressive career, first got on board with one of the queasifying films without knowing, nor caring, about his eventual demise. He didn’t even read the script.
He previously opened up to Entertainment Weekly about this fact, stating, “Back before I signed on to Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise and Cameron Crowe, my agent and I were talking on the phone, and I said, ‘Yeah, I want to work with those guys’.”
When his agent encouraged him to read the script, Russell responded, “‘Well, do you want to read the script first?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t care if it’s one line or 100 lines, if they kill seven people or what. It doesn’t make any difference. I want to work with those people, I think they’d be fun to work with.’”
However, Hudson didn’t find it difficult to watch her stepfather play the knowledgeable father figure in Vanilla Sky. Instead, it was 2006’s Poseidon, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, that first caused her issues. Russell continued in the interview, “I felt a little bit that way about Wolfgang…. And then my agent went through the process of just bleeding them dry for as much money as he could possibly get.”
In the movie, a huge wave crashes into a luxury ship on New Year’s Eve and leaves many of the guests stranded, desperately attempting to survive in Titanic-esque danger. It’s a chance for Russell’s character, Ramsey, to do the right thing at the cost of his own life. He drowns, sacrificing himself for the other survivors.
Speaking to Contact Music, Hudson felt the blow as if it were real. “I had a really hard time watching the drowning scene. That said, that’s one of the best drowning scenes I’ve ever seen. I was shocked,” she reflected.
Not only did it present the very real eventuality of his demise, but it reminded her of a time she had previously felt that way. “I remember when I saw Backdraft for the first time; I was just a mess, and then I had dreams after that forever. It brings you way too close to the mortality of your parents,” she said.
Quite the opposite of the threat of engulfing waves, the 1991 action-thriller Backdraft focuses on two feuding siblings who work as Chicago firefighters, put to the test when a series of arson attacks erupt across the city. In the climax, like in Poseidon, it is Russell who suffers.
His character, Stephen ‘Bull’ McCaffrey, falls from a collapsing catwalk during a fire rescue. He holds on until the ride to the hospital, in which he succumbs to his injuries with his brother, played by William Baldwin, by his side. Hudson’s nightmares are, apparently, made of the stuff.
