FAMILY STAYS IN FOCUS
The Cleaning Lady’s Oliver Hudson doesn’t take his famous clan for granted, writes Siobhan Duck
OVER the years, Oliver Hudson has turned down many exciting, big-budget projects because they would take too much time away from his wife, Erinn Bartlett, and their three kids: Wilder, 15, Bodhi, 12, and Rio, 9. The LA-based actor even hesitated before signing up for his latest project – playing FBI agent Garrett Miller in crime drama The Cleaning Lady – because it films in New Mexico. But when the creators agreed to adjust his shooting schedule to more family-friendly hours, he was all in.
Hudson says he became invested in the high-stakes storylines of the addictive Foxtel thriller, which centres on Thony De La Rosa (Elodie Yung), a Cambodian-Filipino surgeon who is forced to do some very bad things for some very bad people in the US for one very good reason: her son.
“My kids are my entire life,” he says. “If your child is in a life-or-death situation, of course you do anything, and I would break the law as long as I’m not hurting anybody else. But if it means potentially saving the life of my child, then yeah, at that point, morals might go out the window a little bit because now it’s just survival mode.”
Away from The Cleaning Lady set, Hudson lives within a stone’s throw of his childhood home in Hollywood, and his younger siblings, actors Kate Hudson and Wyatt Russell. Unfortunately, their hectic schedules mean they’re often working in separate corners of the globe.
“Everyone is all over the place, so it’s not that sort of Sunday dinner type of a vibe,” he says.
“But we’re very loyal and very close. I just wish we had more time with each other. But it works. And it’s how we’ve grown up, understanding that you might not always be together physically all the time, but [the love] runs so deep [so] it doesn’t really matter.”
Coming from a famous clan – his mother is Goldie Hawn and he calls her longtime partner Kurt Russell “Pa” – could be a double-edged sword.
Hudson’s family friend Gwyneth Paltrow – herself the daughter of late director Bruce Paltrow and actor Blythe Danner – has pointed out that the offspring of celebrities must work far harder to prove themselves. But laid-back Hudson shrugs it off.
“There are actors who work their ass off just to get to LA and then keep working their asses off to just get a sh--ty agent,” he reflects. “So I don’t think those who’ve been handed the silver spoon understand anything of those real challenges. There is an expectation when you walk in the door. But we don’t just get one foot in the door; it’s two because you come from a lineage. And because of that, they’ve given you an opportunity, but then they’re watching you going, ‘OK, so his sister has won a Golden Globe, his parents are major movie stars – let’s see what he can do.’”
THE CLEANING LADY SEASON TWO CONTINUES AT 9PM, TUESDAY, FOXTEL