Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn Go on Mother-Daughter Misadventure in Snatched

“That’s a very fraught, charged relationship,” says actress Goldie Hawn of the complex connection that mothers have with their daughters. Yet it can also be—as in the case of the mother-daughter duo played by Hawn and Amy Schumer on the big screen this month—a relationship full of laughs.

Hawn and Schumer’s new film, Snatched (in theaters May 12), is a vacation-gone-wrong caper set in the jungles of South America. Hawn, 71—in her first feature film since The Banger Sisters (2002)—plays an overly cautious mother, Linda, who longs to spend more time with her daughter. Schumer, 35—who made the move from TV to the big screen when she wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed comedy Trainwreck (2015)—plays her optimistic daughter, Emily.

When Emily is dumped by her boyfriend and doesn’t want to lose her nonrefundable trip to Ecuador, she convinces Linda to join her, setting the hilarity in motion.

In real life, getting Hawn to do the movie also took some convincing. Schumer first approached her about the project two years ago, after seeing her on an airplane. “She was a couple rows ahead of me; I just kinda creepily stared at her the whole flight,” jokes Schumer.

Once they landed in Los Angeles, she approached Hawn, whose long movie résumé includes Shampoo, Private Benjamin, Overboard, The First Wives Club and Seems Like Old Times. “Hiiiii . . . I’m a comedian, I’m gonna do this movie and I really want you to play my mom,” said Schumer. It took meeting Hawn a second time in London, and Hawn’s daughter, actress Kate Hudson, nudging her to read the script. The next time Hawn and Schumer saw each other was on the Snatched set.

Collaborating was “beyond my wildest dreams because I’ve loved her for solong,” says Schumer.

“She’s really, really smart,” adds Hawn of her co-star, the creator and star of the Peabody Award–winning Comedy Central sketch comedy series Inside Amy Schumer. “This girl knows what she’s doing.”

Big Laughs

While Hawn’s father, Edward, worked as a watch repairer and a professional musician in Washington, D.C., her mother, Laura, operated a gift shop and started the dancing school in which young Goldie began training at 3 years old. “My mom was fierce,” says Hawn, who remembers how dinner table conversation with her older sister, Patti, “was never about who we were gonna marry—it was what we could do, what we were gonna be. We had a really liberated mother.”

But much like the character Hawn plays in the film, Laura was not the adventurous type. One of Hawn’s favorite memories is scaring the bejesus out of her mom in San Francisco by driving up one of the city’s steepest streets. “I forgot that she was afraid of heights! I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing—I’m taking my mother on a joyride? It’s one of her worst fears!’” When Hawn pulled over, however, she and her mom cracked up. “You know how you remember the big laughs in your life? That is one of them,” she says, recalling how at that moment, a woman stopped to ask, “‘Are you mother and daughter? I wish I had that kind of relationship with my mother.’ That’s who we were.”

Hawn has built the same close relationship with her own daughter, Kate, 37, whom she affectionately calls Katie. (Hawn also is mom to her actor sons Oliver Hudson, 40, and Wyatt Russell, 30, whom she raised with her partner of 34 years, actor Kurt Russell.)

“We’re a very big laughing family, and we love to be together,” she says. She and Kate laugh hardest, she says, “on a night where the two of us are drinking wine and we get on a roll about men, or we get on a roll about something, and we look at each other and we’re like, ‘Why aren’t we writing a script?!’ I could say I’m proud of her, but I don’t like ‘pride’—I think it’s too selfish. I’m in awe.”

‘I Was a Terror’

Schumer’s roots are in New York City’s Upper East Side, where she was raised—alongside her older brother, Jason, and younger sister, Kim—by Sandy, a stay-at-home mom. Schumer describes her as loving, silly and very hands-on.

One of Schumer’s earliest memories with her mom was at age 6, at a hotel on vacation. “She was holding me in this pool and guiding me around, and I just remember that was the safest, best feeling I ever felt.” Just five years later, life began to change drastically when her father, Gordon, who owned a baby furniture company, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and Sandy went back to work as a teacher and hearing therapist for the deaf to support the family.

Then her parents split up (all of which Schumer writes about in her 2016 memoir, The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo).

By the time she was 15, “I was just a terror,” Schumer says. “I was smart, I was funny and I was sarcastic.” When Sandy returned to dating, “she would introduce me to her boyfriend, I would be like, ‘Oh, Dad!’ ” says Schumer. “I would pretend to be way too attached to them really quick.”

Now, Schumer’s mom is recently retired. “You know I gave her some money, girl!” says Schumer. And these days, they laugh the hardest when they’re reminiscing—like about the time Schumer’s SAT scores came in. “We couldn’t believe I broke 1000, so my mom and I were jumping on the couch. I guess we both thought I was an idiot,” she says. “She was so happy I was going to college!”

Moms Are People Too

The two co-stars both agree that pulling from their own lives is what makes their relationship feel so real onscreen. In some cases, there are even direct moments from Schumer’s life used as dialogue in the film. Which is why when she saw the film with her mom, “I squeezed her hand at those parts,” she says.

Their roles also got them reflecting about the evolution of children seeing their own moms as people for the very first time.

For Schumer, it was at age 12, when her parents divorced and her mom began relying on her daughters more. “That was the first time where I was like, ‘She’s a woman having a hard time, and she’s doing the best that she can.’ ”

For Hawn, the shift came after moving out at age 19, when she saw the challenges her mother faced from a new perspective. “I started looking at the trajectory of my mother’s life, and realizing that everyone goes through all kind of changes—and that level of compassion and understanding is a great growth of my life.”

It’s a shame, really, that Hawn’s mom, who died in 1993, couldn’t see Snatched. “She would have loved it,” Hawn says. “I can feel her from the heavens, being like, ‘Honey, good for you!’ ” She hopes the film will inspire more mothers and daughters to connect in deeper ways about their mistakes, their struggles, their mislaid dreams and their good times together.

“I would say to all mothers: Be who you are. Be a real person,” she says. “Don’t always feel like you have to be a mother.”

Schumer agrees—because, she says, your mom is like your oldest friend. “You’re like, ‘Oh my God, we have so much history together. She knows all of my history.’” And she adds, “No one’s ever gonna love you more.”