Originally appeared on E! Online
Oliver Hudson is shining a spotlight on growing up in his famous family.
The Nashvilleactor shared how being raised by Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell—along with his siblings Kate Hudson, Boston Russell and Wyatt Russell—has impacted his self-esteem.
“Coming from a successful family, I wrestle with comparison. I wrestle with insecurity,” Oliver said in a confessional during the season five premiere of Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test. “My mother’s an icon, so a part of me feels like I have to accomplish something greater for them to be truly proud of me.”
Oliver—dad to kids Wilder, 18, Bodhi, 15, and Rio, 12, with wife Erinn Bartlett—competed alongside 14 other celebrity recruits on the FOX reality series, which puts participants through grueling challenges inspired by the real-life U.S. Special Forces selection process.
Though he shared insight into why he joined the show, it wouldn’t be the first time the Scream Queensactor has opened up about his childhood.
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“My mother was the one that I had almost the most trauma about, interestingly enough, because she was my primary caregiver, and I was with her all of the time,” Oliver—whose biological dad is Bill Hudson—said on his and Kate’s podcast Sibling Revelry in 2024. “So, I felt unprotected at times. She would be working and away or she had new boyfriends that I didn’t really like.”
And while he may have felt that way as a child, Oliver, 50, emphasized that he’s always seen Goldie as “an amazing mother.”
“She would be living her life,” he added. “This was my own perception as a child who didn’t have a dad and who needed her to be there, and she just wasn’t sometimes.”
But there are other parts of his childhood he wouldn’t trade for the world. After all, Oliver previously shared he hopes to keep his own kids as down to Earth as possible, just as Kurt, 75, and Goldie, 80, did for their brood.
“It starts within the four walls of your home,” Oliver told E! News in December 2025. “It doesn’t matter what any outside perspective is, how famous you are, how much money you have. When it’s just you and your family is what really matters.”
Indeed, Oliver explained that for The Thingactor and The First Wives Clubactress, it was “very important for them not to have entitled children.”
“Now I can pass that along to my babies as well, taking from what Katie and I, and Wyatt and Boston, have learned as children,” he continued. “To be able to implement those strategies and feelings into our own children.”
After all, family is what reallymatters. As he put it, “All of the things that you see, all of the cameras and all the flashes, that’s all BS.”
Keep reading for a closer look into Goldie and Kurt’s sweetest family moments…
The Family That Gives Together…
Like Grandma, Like Granddaughter
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