Patrick Fugit Had a ‘Crush’ on ‘Almost Famous’ Costar Kate Hudson at 16 (Exclusive)

25 years after Almost Famous hit theaters, the movie’s lead actor Patrick Fugit remembers harboring a crush on costar Kate Hudson while filming the rock n’ roll-inspired coming-of-age story.

Fugit, now 42, sat down with PEOPLE recently to discuss the movie’s 25th anniversary. The actor remembers the real-life experience of making his screen-acting debut as mirroring the character he played — a teenager stepping into the world of rock music and music journalism.

That was in part due to Hudson, who broke out with an Oscar-nominated role as the enigmatic music fan Penny Lane.

“I screen tested with Kate Hudson, and she was very magnetic and very captivating,” Fugit recalls. “I was 16. I was like, ‘Yes, I will be excited to do scenes with her.’ ”

Almost Famous follows teenaged music journalist William Miller (Fugit), whom Rolling Stone hires to profile a fictional rock band named Stillwater in 1973, without realizing he is only 15. As William ingratiates himself with the band, he develops a kinship with Hudson’s Penny, a teenager who travels with rock groups as a self-identified “band-aid.”

“It was seven months of my life. I was 16 years old,” Fugit says, acknowledging the production’s impact on him as a teenager. “I had developed my full on crush on Kate Hudson, and that had sort of subsided. And it was all very pivotal or developmental in a mid-teenager’s life.”

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In the movie, William struggles to get the members of Stillwater — played by Billy Crudup, Jason Lee, Mark Kozelek and John Fedevich — to sit for an on-the-record interview. He also has to navigate the romantic relationship between Crudup’s character Russell Hammond and Hudson’s Penny, who is depicted as a well-known figure behind the scenes of rock tours of the era.

“The scenes with Kate, they come across like she’s taking me by the hand and sort of like pulling me through this like whirlwind of what William considers magic,” Fugit recalls of filming scenes with Hudson, who was roughly 19 during filming.

He continues: “So Kate was really in that during those scenes, and then also off-set Kate was very much like that as well. So it did not feel grounded. It felt very mystical, it felt romantic, it felt exciting and all of those things that come across in those scenes.”

Though Fugit, who now lives in Texas with his wife, Jenny Del Rosario, participated in a virtual reunion for the movie hosted by Rolling Stone in 2020, the actor admits he has not necessarily kept in close contact with his costars or writer-director Cameron Crowe, though he did appear in Crowe’s 2011 movie We Bought a Zoo.

“I loved the experience and I really felt close with [Crudup], felt close with Cameron, felt fairly close with Kate by the end,” he says. “But there was a period of time where we do publicity for the thing, the movie comes out and then you don’t really talk.”

He adds, “And I remember at 16 that was a bit of a tough transition where I sort of realized, it’s not inauthentic, the experience you have, and it feels very loving and friendly and like you’re an acting troupe, but once it’s over, it’s very rare for that to persist.”