In the hallway outside an L.A. hotel meeting room sits a poster for the film Fool’s Gold. It shows the film’s attractive stars, Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, hugging. Hudson says that we shouldn’t look too closely at the poster, in which she is wearing a bikini, because like many things in this city, the picture is far from real.


“Those aren’t my breasts,” she says of the picture. “They are totally not my boobs. My boobs aren’t that big. Those look like [Jennifer] Aniston’s. I mean, they look great. If I was going to have them done, I would take them to the doctor and say, ‘This is how I would like them to look.’ ”


In the film—which opens on Friday, February 8—Hudson plays Tess, a former treasure hunter who has decided to drop out of an eight-year quest to find a sunken Spanish ship that had been rumoured to be carrying gold. In order to leave that career behind, she has to divorce her husband, Finn (McConaughey), who wants to continue the search. He thinks he can talk her out of her decision, but she is determined to stick with her new job as a steward on the yacht of a billionaire (Donald Sutherland). Although Tess sees the yacht as her new home, Finn, however, sees it as a way of accessing the treasure.


Things were far more real during the filming of Fool’s Gold than the poster lets on. The cast and crew were mostly on the water when they were shooting in Australia, and they were forced to prepare for what Sutherland says are “seven of the 10 things that can kill you” there, including crocodiles, poisonous jellyfish, and sharks. Hudson says that she was reticent to plunge into the ocean.


“I thought I knew what I was getting into, but there were a lot of surprises. Someone would say, ‘There’s a shark over there,’ or ‘That’s a stingray,’ or ‘If you get stung by a box jellyfish, you will die.’ Every day we were out in the boat, [costar] Brian Hooks would say, ‘What am I doing here?’ We would be the last two people in the water. We would sit on the side of the boat and look down and he would say, ‘What is that?’ He would finally work himself up and then he would literally start screaming and jump in. I tried to do that, but it didn’t work, so I was always the last one in.”


Hudson says that she liked her character and was particularly happy to take on a role that brought out the best in her. Being in the middle of a divorce from rocker Chris Robinson, she says that she welcomed the change and even eventually embraced the wilds of Australia.


“Tess is very tomboyish and very cynical,” she says. “She is not a ‘smiley’ character, which was fun for me. I am an innately smiley person, which is why people keep putting me in smiley roles. So it was fun for me to play the part, and the timing was perfect. I was just getting a divorce from Chris. He had just filed, and the pain of losing something that you loved, even though you might know that it just doesn’t work, is difficult. It is horribly difficult in anyone’s life, even if it is for the better. So I could really relate to Tess’s situation.


“It was also nice to be working far away from the U.S. for that reason, and also because I was doing things that I thought I had lost a part of in the last 10 years. When I was 16, I was more of a tomboy. I would go heli-skiing or anything that seemed like fun. But then you get married and you start working and I had Ryder [her son with Robinson].…So this movie allowed me to do things I thought I would never do again. It also kind of reminded me of how easy it is to start making things too precious. I am fine. You look at the water and the vast oceans and the things you have no control over, and they are the things that every human should be aware of, and be aware that we are just these tiny things in the middle of it all."