It has taken 15 years, three presidential elections, and a comedy script from Amy Schumer, but Goldie Hawn—the beloved blonde, Oscar-winning actress—is finally returning to movie screens next month. But why did Hawn leave Hollywood in the first place? In a new interview with daughter Kate Hudson, Hawn finally reveals why she bowed out of the industry after making 2002’s The Banger Sisters.
“I believe that life is about doing,” Hawn explained to Hudson in a conversation for Interview magazine, after being asked the million-dollar question. “It’s about changing. It’s about transitioning. I can’t imagine, as a human being, not being able to grow. When I turned 50, I asked some of my girlfriends, all actresses of the same age, ‘What are we going to do now?’
“I wanted to go live somewhere for a while, learn archaeology, or take part in healing the world on some level,” Hawn continued. “I wanted to dig deep and say, ‘Who am I now? What do I have to offer? What do I have to learn?’ I started learning about the brain, psychology. And after 9/11, I decided, ‘I know what I’m going to do.’ ”
But Hawn wasn’t going to act or produce—she was going to create in an entirely different way.
“I ended up writing two books and creating MindUP,” Hawn says, citing the international educational organization for children she founded. “It’s now in Jordan, Serbia, the U.K., America, Canada, Hong Kong. I never looked back. I never wished to be acting again. I was so engaged.”
(In a previous interview with Yahoo, Hawn also suggested that she had no interest in waiting around for Hollywood offers either: “Every woman hits a certain age; every woman has to face it. That’s the way it goes, and I really am not a sit-around-and-wait-for-the-phone-to-ring person.”)
In 2016, Schumer confessed that it took her several years to convince Hawn to take a role in the mother-daughter comedy she had written.
“I met her on an airplane a couple of years ago and told her there’s a movie I really want to make with her,” Schumer told the Los Angeles Times. “And she was very nice. ‘O.K., honey.’ She probably thought I was a psycho. . . . Then I’d meet her at different things, saying, ‘We’re making this movie together,’ and I think, eventually, some people got in her ear and told her I wasn’t crazy, that I make things.”
In her conversation with Hudson, Hawn also reflected on how the industry changed while she was still acting in film, and the one movie star who is not having any of this television business.
“The business was changing while I was in it,” Hawn reflected. “Conglomerates were coming in, starting to buy studios. Now it’s all about being on the stock market, building amusement parks. Videotapes started back then, and I remember Jack Nicholson saying, ‘I’m never going to be on one of those small screens!’ And I thought, Dude, I don’t think we have a choice!”
