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From earning a best actress Oscar nomination for her work in Song Sung Blue to the upcoming second season of her Netflix series Running Point (streaming April 23) to her role ringing in the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics by performing a moody arrangement of “California Dreamin’,” Kate Hudson is busy busy right now.
“My children have forgotten my name,” she jokes to me about how often she’s been out of the house this year. “But it doesn’t come along so often, so everyone in my family is rooting for me.”
The Los Angeles-born Hudson, 46, has been caught up in a whirlwind since Song Sung Blue first premiered at the AFI Film Festival in the fall, and the early whispers about her performance’s awards potential grew into outright shouts. (At the Gotham Awards in November, her Song Sung Blue co-star Hugh Jackman made the bold proclamation that Hudson would win an Oscar for the role, 25 years after her first nomination for Almost Famous.) Still, as Hudson tells me on the latest episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast — recorded live at Meta Lab in West Hollywood — she won’t be ready to process this wild ride until after the Oscars ceremony is over on Sunday, March 15. She even has an exact time: Noon on Monday, March 16.
When Hudson joined me for a live conversation this week, it was actually the second time we’d spoken this awards season — she was a previous guest on the Prestige Junkie podcast back in December, when Song Sung Blue hadn’t yet opened in theaters. I was thrilled to catch up with her now that Hudson is an Oscar nominee and the Focus Features film is a success ($57 million worldwide) — a rare feat these days for the kind of mid-sized, adult-focused dramas that both Hudson and I have a lot of affection for.
“There’s a certain type of movie that made me excited to be an actor,” Hudson says in our conversation, which you can hear on today’s special bonus edition of the podcast. “When I was younger, I’d see it in the movie theater. And I realized after I’d seen Song Sung Blue that we hadn’t seen those movies on the big screen in a long time. Like Terms of Endearment or Moonstruck or even Joy — it’s not very often that you see them, and I miss them. My only hope was that I wasn’t going to be the only one who felt that way.”
Based on the true story of Mike and Claire Sardina, the Milwaukee-based Neil Diamond tribute band known as Lightning & Thunder, Song Sung Blue is a romance as well as a story of artistic ambition, with Hudson’s Claire and Jackman’s Mike falling in love over their shared love of performance. Hudson has her own distinct relationship with music and performing, recommitting to recording her own music during the pandemic and releasing her album Glorious in 2024 — partly because, as Hudson told me, she realized it was time to start betting on herself.
“I think the thing I’ve learned over 25 years now of working is you don’t have a crystal ball,” Hudson explains. “You could work with the great director that everybody wants to work with, and it could end up not being their best movie. Or it could be the opposite. If we all had a crystal ball, we’d all make all the right choices all the time. But you do have to take responsibility for those choices. You start reflecting on those things and going, ‘How am I gonna try to make the best possible choices and why am I making them?’”
Hear much more from Hudson about the making of Song Sung Blue, the process of preparing for Oscar night and how she’s bonded with her fellow best actress nominees throughout awards season on today’s special bonus edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast — thanks again to Meta Lab L.A. for hosting! And make sure to subscribe to Prestige Junkie After Party to watch tomorrow night’s SAG-AFTRA Actor Awards (where Hudson is a nominee) with Christopher Rosen and me live, starting at 5 p.m. PT. See you then!
