Kate Hudson

Emmanuel Itier: Were you cautious about working together again?

Kate Hudson: We had been, but we’d gotten quite a few opportunities to do it before.

Matthew McConaughey: But nothing really that we said yes to.

KH: The things that kind of came, we were both like, “yuck.” We both agreed on that.

MM: We were like, “For so and so, that would be a repeat. Don’t want to do that. Don’t want to do that.” Then this came.

KH: Then this came, and it just kind of felt like the relationship felt right and it was kind of an extension of what worked with How To Lose a Guy, but at the same time, it’s completely different with two totally different characters.

MM: It sounded like a lot of fun.

KH: And we did have fun. We had a blast.

EI: Do you think audiences like to see actors in another relationship again?

KH: I don’t know.

MM: I think that, if it works, which it did in How To Lose A Guy, in the same way that we were looking for and anticipating finding the right thing because we wanted to get together again, I think that the audience might want to see McConaughey and Hudson get back together again. “I don’t know if they’re going to do it, but I want to see them together again.” That’s just the same way that we wanted to and wanted to just find the right thing. How many years has it been between them?

KH: Five?

MM: Five, yeah. I hope it’s a good thing. Hopefully that’s the reason people will want to see it on the eighth.

KH: It was nice working together again. We just have fun working together.

EI: Matt, you said in magazine, “We are the perfect pain in each other’s asses.”

KH: He said that?

EI: What do you mean?

MM: That’s a fact, yeah. She can be a real pain in the ass.

KH: I’m not that bad. I think that it’s just a personal thing. In a relationship, we can drive each other crazy, but what I was saying earlier is that there’s like real honest love for each other that’s just because we love each other.

MM: Yeah. There’s a real honest love and respect that’s really easy to get onscreen when it’s a scene about, “Give me a break.” You don’t have go mining for that. [Laughs]

KH: It’s also one of those things that when you start knowing somebody so well and you love them like my brothers, or even in relationships–the things that drive you crazy, you love the things that drive you crazy about them.

MM: It’s true, yeah.

EI: The great tan you both have–how? Did it last long afterwards?

KH: We followed summer for a year. It was a year of summer for us. I was really tan, which is why I’m so pale right now. I’m taking a break.

MM: We went and had a summer in Malibu. Then we went to Australia for six months and had summer there and came back straight to another summer.

KH: Yeah, we came back to summer and I actually came back and went straight to New York because I live half the time in New York. I was like, “Give me something. I just want a scarf. I want to cover my body and wear cold clothes.” I’m like Matthew, I get… Chris used to say that I’d sit and he’d watch me get tan over lunch. I could just sit there because I’m Italian and I have that olive skin. You’re actually a little bit more red. I could put on 40 sunblock and we’d be loading up on the sunblock and getting just…

MM: Torched.

KH: It was crazy. It lasted for a whole year.

EI: Were the underwater scenes scary or tough?

KH: Yeah, but we had to know our emergency procedures. For the last month of shooting in the tank was all emergency procedures, but they became so second-nature because we were doing them so much that, I mean, it became easy. The only thing is that when you’re underwater, you really have to be sharp. There’s no laziness when you’re working in water.

MM: You don’t really fool around. Behind the camera down there, it’s almost as large of a crew as you have on land because every single person… she has her girl who’s a great diver who’s behind the camera and has an extra tank in case anything comes up, and I have mine. Everyone has their person. Then you get an action sequence and the bubbles are going up around you and you can’t see the visuals.

KH: And you don’t have air while you can’t see.

MM: You don’t know if you’re up or down. You don’t know if you’ve gotten inverted or what, but you learn to hold your breath a little longer than you probably thought you could.

KH: I got up to 45 seconds, which I think is pretty good, but I had to do that whole blowhole sequence, and the thing is that they cut it and it looks like we weren’t doing it all in one take, but we were doing all of that stuff in one take. I had to wrap myself around the cannon and pull myself to the cannon, and the bubbles would come, and they actually have this mechanism in the water that created the wave. That was actually the scariest one because I couldn’t see anything and I was holding on. So I was a little nervous. You just had to trust that the people who were there could see you go like this. It was really fun, though.

MM: You had to trust. There was a lot of buddy-breathing. Do you know what that is? There’s a survival tank and you go down, slowly submerging, and you get down to the bottom and get your breath, then you pull out and share that. You share the air and you go back and forth. That also helps your comfort in that you know if you are in trouble, someone’s got it. There’s a hand signal where someone will come with it.

KH: [Laughs] Do you remember my hand signal when I saw the manatee? When I was getting certified? I was so scared. I was in the ocean.

MM: The little bubbles would come out in grunts.

KH: Because I was getting certified and behind me was a manatee and they’re like the size of a table.

MM: It’s like a sea cow.

KH: I saw it and I was about to do my mask flood, where I take my mask off and I’m in the ocean, and I didn’t really know what it was. It was murky and it looked like a whale to me, and then even when I told my dive instructor, Michelle, she was going, “Calm down, calm down.” She turns around and kind of went back there and went, “Wow.” Then we went up and I think the exact words out of my mouth were, “What the fuck was that?” Then, of course, everyone was so excited to see it.

MM: Yeah, then it turned out cool. Talking to Michelle, she told us that you don’t see those. It’s very rare, and we happened to be in the water at the right time.

EI: Kate, what kind of dad will Matthew be? I don´t want to embarrass you…

KH: Oh, there’s nothing embarrassing about that. I think he will be an incredible dad. I think that because people see Matthew always out doing something, whether that’s out dancing in a bar or being on the beach or taking a hike with some crazy bandana on, I think that, like anything, they take their image and what they want somebody else to be and then they just run with that. When you really know the person, though, and you really love the person, you recognize that that person is nothing like what people want. It’s not real. It’s just not. Matthew happens to be one of the most loving and loyal people I know, and his family is important to him, and I that’s one thing that I believe we connect on. He’s great with kids, and I think he’ll be a very responsible and absolute blast of a dad.

MM: Make no doubt about it–my kid will dance, go to the beach, and take hikes.

KH: This is what I get to teach Matthew, though. You think that now, and then you have your child and you realize that they’re nothing like what you expect them to be.

EI: Are you expecting lifestyle changes, Matt?

MM: My instincts will take over when the kid comes, but the one thing I’ve heard that’s consistent, and I’ve got a lot of great moms and dads around me from my own elders to peers of mine, is that all the grand plans that you want to make, take them and throw them out.

EI: What are you looking forward to the most?

MM: Everything.

KH: No sleep. [Laughs]

MM: I’ll find out about that. But honestly, the thing that I’ve always dreamed about this is that, I mean, we all have projects. We have things. We have goals that we achieve and we build something up. We’re architects of things. Well, the greatest thing that I can be, that I’ve always looked forward to the most, is being the architect of raising a child of mine. That’s going to be brand new every day, and it’s never going to repeat itself.

KH: It’s also one of those things for everybody that when you have kids, you just do the best that you can, and everybody goes through difficulties with parenting. They go through the joys of it, they go through the difficulties of it. It’s the greatest journey of all, which is such a cliché, but it is, and at the same time, everybody raises their kids differently. Everyone has their own ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong. At the end of the day, you just hope that they’re happy, and when you see your kids happy – I don’t know – those are the moments when you realize that there’s nothing else on the planet that you’d rather be doing than watching your child be that happy at that moment. That’s the greatest reward, I think, for everything. Then, when you see them when they’re not happy, which you do, it’s also the most devastating and you just want to take it away. It becomes all-consuming and there are no answers. There’s nothing. Nobody can tell you to do things the way that you want to do them. No one can say what’s right or what’s wrong. Some people don’t feed their children meat. Some people do. It’s a crazy world.

EI: Are you enjoying single life?

KH: I like it. I like it. My single life is me, Ryder and Chris. [Laughs] It doesn’t change. Really, my main focus is Ryder, and the same with Chris. I just feel like, personally, I’m in a really nice place because I’m so happy being alone with our son. Chris is too. It’s kind of a really nice place to be in. I’m not really interested in a relationship right now. I’m interested in my son.

EI: Matt, aren´t you doing a lot of things with your production company, j.k. livin´?

MM: Yeah, the first thing that we did is that, over the last two years, we finally got a real matthewmcconaughey.com website, which I’m real proud of. It’s one of the only ways that you can share information, and so getting into that, getting online, is something I’m excited about. That took two years to do. I’m real proud of the site. It’s real personal and it’s finally my official one. Two, we just finished production on Surfer Dude, which is a j.k. livin´ production. We’ve been developing that for seven years. We just finished shooting it and we’re in post-production now, and that’s the first really homegrown one, beginning through to the end, that we’ve done.

KH: I’m excited about that because the director is really wonderful.

MM: The third thing that we just finished producing is my first music album with Mishka– that’s the guy from Austin–and that album will be out sometime in February and he’s on tour right now with Xavier Rudd, who’s doing the score for Surfer Dude. They’re hitting Canada here in the next couple of days, and so far so good. It’s really a buzz.

EI: What about the death of Heath Ledger?

KH: I think that everybody is still processing it. It’s hard to talk about. It’s very sad. He is loved and I’m just thinking about his family right now.

EI: What is your favorite love song for Valentine’s Day?

MM: Good luck. “Coastline Journey” by Mishka.

KH: I don’t know. That’s such a good question. God, I always think that I’m just old-school.

EI: So many tropical movies… Do you love the beach?

MM: I just happen to be there, and they’re all in connection to nature too.