One thing she’s not sentimental about, though, is acting. Growing up, she says, she had more fun in gym class than in theater class. “Sometimes [in theater class] I just felt like, ‘Stop with the talking—just do it!’” she says, realizing aloud that she sounds like a Nike advertisement. “I don’t like to analyze; I just like to put it out there.” She still plays regular pickup games of soccer, and one gets the feeling that going head-to-head with her on the field would be a physical risk. Her figure is svelte, sure, but also, to borrow her favorite adjective, solid—she’s no fragile waif—and her demeanor is marked by a calm confidence. “She’s fearless,” says Cook, who likewise resorts to sports lingo in describing Hudson’s approach to filming My Best Friend’s Girl. “She jumps cannonball-style into the deep end.”
Perhaps the most truly free-spirited thing about Hudson is her constant pursuit of fun. It is, to her, the motivation for and solution to almost any situation—and the key to her parents’ lasting happiness. “I think it’s their trick,” she muses. “When the hard stuff starts to hit, they meet at this fun place where they can play. I think you need to find somebody you can play with.” Of course, this guiding principle is hardly a safeguard against difficult times, which Hudson understands all too well—apart from her very public divorce, she was reportedly devastated by Owen Wilson’s attempt on his life shortly after a romance between them ended, though she won’t discuss the incident publicly. She admits that her approach to life is hardly risk-free. “I have this personality—and there’s a downside to it too—but I have this thing where it’s like, okay, I’ve chosen to bungee jump off this ledge,” she says. “I have to do it. And if the cord snaps, well, I might as well enjoy the ride down.”
One suspects she loses little sleep over the common criticism that, since her Oscar-nominated turn in Almost Famous, she’s made a string of all-too-similar romantic comedies that have done little to show her range. “You never know how a movie is going to come out,” says Hudson, who has a chance to prove the doubters wrong with her next two films: Big Eyes, a drama in which she plays painter Margaret Keane, and the musical Nine, Rob Marshall’s film adaptation of the Broadway show, in which she was recently cast alongside Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard and Judi Dench. When it comes to critics, authors and musicians like her ex-husband are the ones who, she thinks, have the tougher burden. “When you are writing a book or a song, you are putting your words and your ideas out there. It’s all you. But at the end of the day, I was just a piece of the puzzle, and yeah, I’m the one who has to go out and sell [the movie]. But I can really dissociate myself from a film once I finish working on it. You have to.”
