Kate Hudson is the envy of anyone who's ever circled the self-improvement section of a bookstore: She's doing the very things that once scared her.
With Rapunzel-like golden waves grazing her waist, Hudson reveals she hesitates to take on funny roles. This may come as a shock to anyone who has seen her as an out-of-touch fashion designer in "Glass Onion," a Type-A fiancée in "Bride Wars" or an ambitious journalist in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days." Now she's promoting her new Netflix show, "Running Point," loosely inspired by the life of Los Angeles Lakers owner Jeanie Buss (an executive producer).
The 10-episode series (now streaming) follows the follies of the fictitious NBA team, the Los Angeles Waves, after Isla Gordon (Hudson) steps in to run it with her brothers (Drew Tarver and Scott MacArthur) when another (Justin Theroux) checks into rehab. Thrust into the role of Waves president, Isla has to quickly find her stride while balancing her personal life and fiancé ( Max Greenfield). Jay Ellis, Chet Hanks, and Brenda Song round out the cast. "Running Point" is Hudson's first time leading a television series.
"I am very timid to do comedy," she admits, "because I sometimes find that people have a tendency to want to water it down, and it makes me nervous." But Hudson, 45, felt confident partnering with series creators Ike Barinholtz, Mindy Kaling and David Stassen. "We're a little filthy sometimes," she says playfully, "but we're not so much so that it's alienating. It's for everybody. There's that line, and when you walk it -- if you get it right -- it's so fun."
Now more than ever, the actress feels moved "to make people laugh and feel good," she says. "When I was younger, I felt like, 'Oh, if I only do that, then you're not going to be taken as this serious actress,' and I just think all of that's been sort of thrown out the window, for everybody."
Twenty-five years ago, Hudson made a name for herself, apart from her well-known parents (Bill Hudson and Goldie Hawn, with her longtime partner Kurt Russell), playing Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical 2000 film "Almost Famous." The role of the ingenue "Band-Aid" earned Hudson Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations.
"I talk about how sometimes there's certain people in your life that just blow open the door for you in terms of experience," Hudson says, "and for Cameron, it was just as much film as it was music."
He would pass along "weird bootlegs," Hudson says, "and we would just go deep into music and art and paintings and photography."
Hudson moved on to 2002's period drama "The Four Feathers" opposite Heath Ledger, and the following year "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days," now a TV mainstay. "We wrote a great story, and we didn't stop until the script was really sort of perfect and felt like a classic rom-com," she says of the film's success. "I think chemistry is always everything in those situations."
Her current goal is simply (and nobly) "to make good art," she says. "I really just want to work with people that I love working with and that inspire me and really, honestly, are inspiring enough to tear me away from my family. Because I also just really love my family, and want to be with my kids."
And its her love for her kids -- Ryder Robinson, 21; Bingham Bellamy, 13; and Rani Hudson Fujikawa, 6 -- and alarm over the pandemic that pushed Hudson to do what she has deemed the most frightening of all she's accomplished: sharing her music.
"For me, writing music has been something I've always done, never shared," she says. "It was my greatest fear because it's my most vulnerable place, creatively. So I was always just sort of happy to not put that out there to be judged and criticized. But then I was like, 'No, because I don't want to leave anything on the table -- good, bad or whatever -- I don't want to leave it on the table.'"
Music is Hudson's "first love," she says and musicals -- like "Meet Me in St. Louis," "All That Jazz," and "Chicago" -- inspired her to be an artist.
"I remember seeing 'Les Mis' and wishing I was Cosette," Hudson says. And while she sang on "Glee" and social media, Hudson only released her first album last year. A deluxe version of "Glorious" -- an amalgam of rock, pop and folk written with the Grammy-nominated Linda Perry and Hudson's fiancé Danny Fujikawa -- was released on Valentine's Day.
"My kids are growing up, and they know how much I love music," Hudson explains. "For them to see me not share it, they would know that I was too afraid to put it out there, and so I couldn't do that either. I was like, 'No, they got to do what they love."
Sharing it has "completely changed my life," Hudson says. "I'm so happy I did it, and it feels like I've creatively just filled the hole, and it was a bigger hole than I thought it was."
Now she struggles to pinpoint another fear to tackle. "I don't think other than jumping out of an airplane, there's anything that would be that scary for me," she says. But her metaphorical to-do list is far from cleared. "I'm an Aries. I'm all over the place. I got to do a million different things."