Kate Hudson can’t hide her smile when she talks about the second season of her Netflix comedy series, Running Point. Coming off a landmark year that includes the breakout success of her first TV series and her second Oscar nomination – 25 years after her first nod for Almost Famous – she’s riding the biggest professional wave of her career. That 2026 nomination came for Song Sung Blue, in which she starred opposite Hugh Jackman as a couple who performed as a Neil Diamond tribute act.”
“It was a completely different experience, honestly,” Hudson tells WHO via video chat from New York. “The first time, I was so young, and everything was so new. It was overwhelming in the most wonderful way. This time, it feels more meaningful because I’ve lived so much more life. I’ve had children, I’ve built businesses, and I’ve had years where I wondered if Hollywood still had a place for me. So then to be given the gift of a role like this and trusted with something this nuanced and emotional – it feels like a full-circle moment, but also like a beginning.”
Kate Hudson on Running Point co-star Brenda Song
In Running Point, Hudson plays Isla Gordon, a woman who unexpectedly inherits the presidency of a fictional L.A. basketball franchise and finds herself fighting for respect in a world that wasn’t built for her. In Season 2, the stakes rise in the family business when her brother Cam (Justin Theroux) returns from rehab to reclaim his seat. “Having Cam back really puts Isla on her toes,” she says. “It brings back all that family dynamic she’s constantly warring with, like how they see her versus how she sees herself, and it lends itself to a really fun season.”
Central to that dynamic is Isla’s best friend and colleague Ali, played by Brenda Song – best known as London Tipton in Disney’s long-running Suite Life franchise. “Brenda is an absolute firecracker,” she says. “She’s as sparkly as sparkly can get, and I have never met anyone who talks faster… This season, we really get to explore what it’s like to work for your best friend. How do you advocate for yourself when your employer is also someone you care about deeply? That’s genuinely difficult territory, and it’s fun to mine it for comedy.”
Hudson is candid about what the show’s themes mean to her personally. On what it takes for a woman to stay on top, she doesn’t mince words. “Women have an amazing ability to see the big picture. But staying on top requires ambition, desire and focus – and I hate to say it, but you’re doubling the effort.” She has a theory about what real equality would look like: “Women will only have true equality when female generational wealth is equal. At the end of the day, everything moves with money.”
How Goldie Hawn inspires Kate
The woman she credits most for shaping that understanding? Her mother, Goldie Hawn, who won her own Oscar for Cactus Flower back in 1970. “We have to start with Mum -she’s number one,” Hudson says. “She was the first female producer to star in her own films and get things made the way she wanted. That kind of ambition, that kind of feminine power alongside real determination – growing up in that was formative.
“I never stopped working, even when the work wasn’t always what I wished it was,” she adds. “But all of those experiences eventually feed back into what you do on screen.” It’s a sentiment that could have come straight from Isla Gordon’s playbook. The woman and the character have more in common than just a smile.
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