It’s rare that promoting a Golden Globe-nominated performance in a Golden Globe-nominated film comes with an apology, but there aren’t too many movies out there like Music.
Kate Hudson made a virtual appearance from her parents’s place on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Friday, and things started off fun with her moving her webcam to show the bed where Kurt Russell had just been napping. The conversation turned to Hudson declaring her love of vinyl records (and bemoaning the fact that her divorce from Chris Robinson meant losing access to such a great library.)
Vinyl records? Music? Well, speaking of Music …
Despite a brutal reception by critics (23 on Metacritic, 10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), the new film Music has been nominated for a Best Musical or Comedy Golden Globe, and Hudson has been nominated for Best Actress in the same category. She stars as Zu, the newly sober drug dealer who finds herself taking care of an autistic half-sister named Music, played by Maddie Ziegler. The film was directed and co-written by Sia, featuring new music, and shot in 2017. V.F.‘s Richard Lawson) compared it to yesteryear’s “smarmily well-intentioned Hollywood exercises in issue-peddling.”
It has received a great deal of criticism from the autistic community, so after she and Jimmy Kimmel hit the expected notes about Sia’s musical brilliance and how “lovely and beautiful” she is, he asked if the intended message of the movie is getting through.
“I think when people see the film, they will see the amount of love and sensitivity that was put into it,” she responded. She added, though, that “it is an important conversation to have, not just about this movie, but as a whole — about representation.”
“It’s not a soundbite conversation,” she continued, “it’s an ongoing and important dialogue to be had, about neurotypical actors portraying neurodivergent characters. It is an important one to have with people, with experts, who know how to engage in the conversation. I encourage it, truly. We are listening.”
When the first trailer to Music dropped in late November, Sia was a little more defensive to the criticism via Twitter.
The conversation, and a clip of Hudson’s Zu singing a new Sia song, is below.
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