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In the middle of our interview, Kate Hudson decides to ask Google a question. She takes out her phone, holding it up to her face with manicured fingers. She’s wearing a gray, precisely tailored Thom Browne suit — tie included — and her lap is covered by a blanket. For Los Angeles, it is a cold and rainy day, and the room at Netflix’s Hollywood complex is a bit chilly.
“Is the highest percentage of people in the world get into the family business?” she asks, trying to amend her language for the machine. She realizes this isn’t going to work. “Terrible, Google. Terrible, Google. That was the wrong thing to say.”
But Hudson is trying to prove something.
In her new Netflix series, “Running Point,” premiering Thursday, she plays Isla Gordon, a character loosely based on executive producer Jeanie Buss, the current president of the Los Angeles Lakers, who took over the business from her legendary father, Jerry. I wonder what that was like for Hudson, who famously followed her movie star mom, Goldie Hawn, to become a movie star herself, and who currently hosts a podcast with her brother Oliver. Like Buss, she too has stayed close to her family’s industry.
She initially brushes off the comparison. For Hudson, 45, going into art and taking over a corporation are totally different paths, but she does think genetics might have something to do with the choice to follow in your parents’ footsteps. Hence, the ill-fated Google search.
“I know one thing: Our family is a very right-brain family,” she says. “Some of us are a little more linear. There’s always differences, but when you grow up with that creative right-brain family, you can feel it.”
Even if Hudson thinks her character is probably more of a “left brain” — more math-oriented, practical — it’s easy to see where they meet as born-and-bred Angelenos who have lived most of their lives in the public eye. The overlap makes “Running Point” the ideal project for Hudson’s first major foray into television comedy. Although she makes a point to note that she was on “Glee” and that her first credited job was a guest stint on “Party of Five,” ever since breaking out in “Almost Famous” in 2000, Hudson has mainly stuck to movies. In fact, series co-creator Mindy Kaling didn’t even think Hudson would be interested when an agent suggested her for the project.
“It just felt like she was in a completely different area in our brains of a kind of performer, and we didn’t know she would ever do a TV show,” says Kaling in a phone conversation. Hearing she was up for it was “very exciting.”
Hudson, for what it’s worth, isn’t snobby about doing television, “I mean, who doesn’t want to do a show that’s fun?” she says, with a carefreeness that becomes familiar after talking to her for a while. But, she adds, if she’s going to spend time away from her kids, who are now 21, 13 and 6, she wants to have a good time. “I’m a very hands-on mommy,” she says.
The actor plays Birdie Jay, a vapid model-turned-fashion-designer, in the “Knives Out” sequel.
As soon as she saw the synopsis for “Running Point,” she was intrigued. “I was like, ‘If this is a good script, I bet I’m going to do this,’” she says. “I got nervous to read it because I was like, ‘Oh, if I don’t like it, it’s going to be such a bummer.’” It was not a bummer, and Hudson signed on not only to star but to be an executive producer.
In “Running Point,” L.A.’s team is the Waves, and Isla, a former party girl, is thrust into the gig when one of her brothers (Justin Theroux) is sent to rehab following a drug-induced car crash. With her new title, Isla must win the respect of players, team owners and members of her family, including her two other siblings (Drew Tarver and Scott MacArthur), who are slightly pissed they got passed over for the big job. Still, the Gordons are largely a loving family despite their many hang-ups.
“I couldn’t imagine Jeanie Buss’ pressure of taking on her father’s legacy and having to continue to build on that legacy,” she says. “Honestly, that is unimaginable to me, the pressure that someone must feel in that, but what I do understand, and this obviously is a comedic way, is constantly trying to prove to yourself that the things you are saying are actually things that could be in the best interest of the franchise. I definitely could relate to that feeling.”
What Hudson does know is Los Angeles sports. In fact, she first met Buss when she was 14. Hudson’s family were big hockey fans, following the Kings during the Wayne Gretzky years. At the time, Buss was running the Forum. “She took me around to show me things,” Hudson remembers.
While Kaling says that Buss approved of Hudson’s casting, the actor didn’t spend much time with her in preparation. “She gave us real artistic license,” Hudson says. “It’s such a fun world. She knew Mindy would nail it. She gave us so much fun insight.”
Hudson did incorporate some of her observations of Buss’ mannerisms into her performance. Wearing aspirational, tailored suits and dresses, Hudson’s portrayal of Isla is of a woman constantly making calculations even while occasionally saying the wrong thing.
“The one thing that I really thought about with Jeanie is I always feel like, and I did this with Isla, even when you’re giving someone your full attention there’s something that has to be done,” she says. “Like, ‘OK, I’m here with this person right now, but I know in the back of my head I’m about to do the biggest trade I’ve ever done in my life.’”
The singer and actor dabbled in music for years before finally making an album. ‘Glorious’ features a song inspired by her mother, Goldie Hawn.
Not that Hudson herself isn’t juggling a number of metaphorical basketballs at all times. In addition to her acting career, she’s also a singer who released her debut album, “Glorious,” last year. (She would love to write a musical one day, she tells me.) She’s also an entrepreneur who, among other pursuits, has a supplements company, InBloom, and a vodka brand, King St. Vodka. The success of those enterprises has allowed her to be choosy when it comes to acting gigs. She also admits she’s the type of person that gets bored easily.
“I feel like even when I’m working on shows, sometimes when I have a couple of days off, I like to be busy,” she says.
Her “happy place” is telling stories onscreen or in music, but she adds, “I used to say I’d be really happy making my own candles and selling them on Etsy.”
Her co-workers describe her as indefatigable.
“We’d be shooting all day and we’d be working so hard, and she’d have big speeches and stunts, and she’d come up to me at like 8 o’clock at night and say, ‘We’re going to the best sushi in L.A. after we wrap, are you in?’” says co-creator David Stassen. “I’d be like, ‘No, I have to go home and sleep. I don’t know what scenes we’re shooting tomorrow.’ But Kate would go and she’d show up the next morning, and she’d be in hair and makeup running her lines.” (Stassen can’t remember the name of the sushi place but notes it is “in an office building in downtown L.A.”)
Brenda Song, who plays Isla’s best friend Ali Lee, confirms that Hudson is willing to keep going when everyone else is exhausted but adds that even while wearing many hats she makes time for the person sitting opposite her.
“She could have a million things going on, but if I’m asking her about, like, ‘I’m worried about my son’s binky,’ she’ll sit there and talk to me for however long, walk me through it, as if it’s the most important thing in the world,” Song says.
Though Hudson impresses upon me just how “right brain” she is — “to be an operator for a business is a completely different skill set than what I’m ever capable of doing or even wanting to do” — Kaling argues that Hudson is “one of the most rational-minded, old-school producers.”
“She is just a real grown-up and I get to learn from her,” Kaling says.
Stassen also says that Hudson was able to bring her specific knowledge of an elite corner of Los Angeles to the production. For instance, during one sequence set in the Waves’ arena tunnels, she noted there weren’t enough extras dressed to look like the VIPs that would be wandering around.
“We had a lot of concession vendors walking back and forth,” Stassen remembers. “She was like, ‘If this was a Lakers game, there’d be a bunch of fancy people in fancy clothes hanging out by the locker room and near the VIP lounge.’”
Hudson’s connection to Los Angeles is deeper, however, than just knowing what the inner workings of a Lakers game look like from the point of view of a celebrity. The show arrives just a month after the destructive wildfires in the city. Hudson is a Palisades resident; Her house was spared, but so many of her friends’ houses were not. In the devastation, she still feels profound emotion for the city.
“I remember going back to my house after all of it, and I felt so sad,” she says. “I remember driving up, and I realized that drive will never be the same ever, and yet I looked out and I saw the ocean and I saw the other side of the Palisades, and you just realize, what a beautiful place to live.”
I ask her how, at this moment, she feels about “Running Point” as a representation of Los Angeles and its sports fandom. On the show, the Waves are the center of the universe. In real life, she finds similarities.
“Anyone who grows up in L.A., you understand there’s all these different pockets, and they all have this special magic, and everyone’s very true to their areas,” she says. “Then there’s just your sports, and if anything’s going to get anyone out of their pocket, it’s going to be the Lakers, it’s going to be the Dodgers, it’s going to be the Rams — and I guess the Chargers too. And I just love sports, and I think that in times that are hard, it’s what gets people feeling this sense of strength and community.”
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