After breaking her Disney-darling “High School Musical” persona with her performance in Harmony Korine’s racy crime drama “Spring Breakers,” she belted “There Are Worse Things I Could Do” as Rizzo in “Grease Live!”
Most recently, she starred in Netflix’s “The Princess Switch” movies.
Of course, she was also “the friend” who encouraged her ex-partner Austin Butler to pursue portraying Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic that scored him an Oscar nomination. Now, Hudgens is revealing that she’s longhad a talent more rare than the rest.
She sees dead people.
In an interview with Cosmopolitan ahead of the release of her upcoming Tubi documentary, “Dead Hot,” Hudgens revealed she had her first supernatural encounter at age 5.
“I was walking into the dining room past the dining table before school,” she told Cosmopolitan. “I had one of those tin ducks, with a mama duck and all the baby ducklings behind it. I remember walking past it and it just starting to, like, move with me. I stopped and I looked at it, and I’m like, that’s weird and makes no sense.”
“Dead Hot,” which premieres April 14 on the free streaming app, follows Hudgens and her best friend, musician Georgia Magree, as they navigate the spirit world in Salem, Mass., exploring witchcraft, ghost hunting and communicating with the dead.
“I’ve always been drawn towards the darkness and the unknown, and it wasn’t really until I went to Scotland while filming ‘The Princess Switch’ that I had my conscious, witch awakening,” she continued. “I was around a lot of witches and just had a lot of questions and was figuring out my own path and my own spirituality.”
Hudgens told Cosmo that her supernatural connection is so intense that she‘s tried to shut it off at times.
“I would be at home and then out of the corner of my eye, I would see a man in the top hat. And I’m like, ‘What the hell!’”
The star had just started living alone and felt frightened. “So I tried to tune it out and turn off that channel,” she told Cosmo. “I think I just had to do some growing up personally in order to feel safe enough to open it back up again.”
While connecting with the spirit world began as a hobby for Hudgens, she loved the prospect of doing a ghost-hunting show. “We had shot an episode originally of basically just that,” she continued. “But after we finished, I felt unfulfilled, and I still had so many more questions that we opened it up to exploring spirituality as a whole because it goes hand in hand.”
Hudgens said she understands there will be naysayers and people who doubt anything that “goes against the grain,” but she’s unbothered. She just wants to remove the stigma of witchcraft and sever its demonic associations.
“I’m not trying to make anyone think the same way I think, but hopefully just open their eyes up a little bit more to the unknown and have more peace with it, rather than fear,” she said.
“I always say I think the only way to heal ancestral trauma is to shine a light on it. I look at places like the witch trials in Scotland and in Salem, and how many women were wrongfully accused and killed over something that is really beautiful. … Really shining a light on it just being a beautiful, personal, empowering thing.”