When I was seven years old, I vividly remember watching Kylie Minogue perform during the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. I can still picture her showgirl costume, with fuchsia feathers and shimmering silver tassels, as she belted out a cover of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” in front of the world.
I didn’t quite realize it yet, but I was about to become one of Minogue’s devoted gay fans, a group she says she would go to “war” for. “There’s something we understand about each other,” she tells me, almost conspiratorially, at the very start of our conversation. “There’s a spirit we both have, which is resilience.”
Resilience is the recurring theme of KYLIE, the new Netflix docuseries that follows Minogue over almost 40 years in the spotlight. We see her bubblegum pop breakthrough in the 1980s, before her struggle against cynical record bosses and the misogynistic tabloid press. She experiences loss, heartbreak, and life-threatening cancer diagnoses, all while continuing to reinvent her image and sound.
The docuseries marks a departure from the elusiveness that has always surrounded Minogue’s personal life. As a star, she’s always been known for being private, to the point where we’re only now learning that she was diagnosed with cancer for a second time in 2021. Throughout making the docuseries, she felt a “low hum of anxiety,” she says. At times, she even wondered, “Is this the worst mistake I’ve ever made?”
My biggest reflection from speaking with her is that she owes her success to a deep desire to break free from constraints, which is just as much a survival mechanism as it is a form of artistic expression. And now that she’s finally reached a point where she’s got nothing left to prove, she’s sharing more than ever before.
Kylie Minogue now
Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
Way back in the decade of big hair and (even bigger) shoulder pads, Minogue’s showbiz story didn’t actually start with music. In 1986, when she was 18, she was cast on the Australian soap Neighbors as Charlene—a tomboy mechanic who embarked on a romance with the soap’s boy-next-door, Scott Robinson. The storyline foreshadowed her real-life romance with costar Jason Donovan, which coincided with Neighbors becoming an unexpected phenomenon in the UK when it started airing on the BBC. At its peak, the soap was watched by more Brits than the entire Australian population, turning Minogue into an A-list star on the other side of the world.
A year later, in 1987, pop stardom beckoned when Minogue flew to London to meet Pete Waterman, the hitmaker behind Rick Astley and Bananarama. The story goes that his team hurriedly wrote and recorded “I Should Be So Lucky,” the disturbingly catchy track that became her pop breakthrough, in just a few hours. But in Minogue’s early years, pop music wasn’t regarded as highly as it is today. Many critics regarded the genre as the pursuit of untalented and uncultured wannabes looking to make an easy buck—music for the masses, not the classes. In the docuseries, even Waterman himself seems to play into these elitist dispersions. “It’s disposable,” he says in archival footage. “You buy it, sing it, it’s not to be taken seriously.”
Minogue tells me she’d be surprised if he still felt that way today, because so much of their work has stood the test of time. But back then, she became the face of supposedly “low art” pop. It made her a target for Britain’s notoriously brutal press, who picked apart everything from her looks to her voice. As someone who discovered Minogue at her early-aughts peak, I had no idea she spent her early career being derided in such clearly gendered terms, or that she was routinely asked inappropriate sexual questions by male interviewers who looked old enough to be her grandfather.
“The Millennials who’ve seen it, you’re all furious! You’re all riled up,” she says with a laugh, seeming amused by my innocence. “I know what happened. I was there. I lived through it, but it was still shocking to me to see it back. Trust me, I was furious, upset, and baffled at the time. But I also think it reveals something about my character, which is that I’m just going to rise above it the best I can.”
Kylie Minogue on Neighbors
Netflix
Throughout her life, Minogue has displayed a desire for change that borders on a compulsion. Whether it’s her image, her sound, or a romantic relationship, she hates being tied down or boxed in. And there’s a quiet courage that weaves its way through her story, which feels simultaneously innate and like it’s been nurtured by people who came into her orbit at the right time.
Michael Hutchence is one such person. Minogue dated the leather-clad, hedonistic lead singer of Australian rock band INXS between 1989 and 1991. When I mention his name, her face breaks into that unmistakable wide smile. She tells me that reminiscing about their relationship was her “first cry” of the documentary.
“I met him when I was 21 years old—that’s when you’re just starting to blossom at the beginning of adulthood,” she says. “He was Epicurean and well-versed. He was a lover of life. He was rock and roll. He was kind. He was just all the things. He was able to harness such incredible energy and still be very olağan. In the same way that I don’t always see myself as the Olympics showgirl, even if it’s part of my being.”
The relationship lasted for a little over two years before the demands of touring pushed the couple apart. Minogue describes the breakup as her first real heartbreak. That later turned into grief: In 1997, Hutchence suddenly passed away amid struggles with alcohol and drugs. It seems like, over 30 years on, Hutchence is still that person for her. Was he the one that got away? “It’s more profound than that,” she tells me, before taking a long pause. “I like it to just live in its own cosmos. And of course, he’s no longer with us, so it really is in its own beautiful space.”
Kylie Minogue performing
Samir Hussein/Getty Images
In 1994, Minogue left Waterman’s record label and moved away from the bubblegum pop that made her a star. She signed to the indie record label Deconstruction, with “Confide in Me,” the lead single of her self-titled fifth album, signaling a darker, moodier era. If the press loved to hate her pop music, then her shift into a sexier sound and image sent them into a full-scale moral panic.
It was at this point that she met another unlikely mentor: Nick Cave, the frontman of the alternative rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. In the documentary, Minogue describes her collaboration with Cave, which spawned the haunting ballad “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” as another undefinable relationship. “It was like another kind of love,” she said, describing a “union that wasn’t romantic.” It was Cave who encouraged Minogue to write her own lyrics, and he was one of the catalysts for her return to pop music, helping her to see the power of the genre she’d spent so long running from. “Pop music has its place,” she says to me. “It’s important, and it’s meaningful.”
With the dance floor calling her evvel again, Minogue finally hit her stride, releasing a string of chart-topping pop bangers, starting with “Spinning Around.” I wonder when she started to feel in control of her own arka? “You know what? Maybe not really until ‘Love at First Sight,’” she says. “I remember writing the bridge to the chorus. That was the first time that I knew that we’d done something that I was like: Wow, this is good. So that’s not until 2001.”
At this point, she had found the balance between creative fulfillment and commercial success. “It felt like I’d cracked my own code,” she remembers. “Or like my DNA had risen to a point where it finally started to solidify.”
Kylie Minogue attends the 2024 Met Gala.
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
It’s difficult to articulate just how famous Minogue was in the UK at this time. In America, Madonna and Britney Spears were considered the “queen” and “princess” of pop. But in Britain, Kylie was unquestionably the princess (and quite possibly the queen too). The same media that spent her early career tearing her down suddenly declared her an adopted national treasure. It was at this moment, right when she was winning awards and topping the charts, that Minogue was diagnosed with breast cancer at just 36 years old. After spending so long rejecting all kinds of constraints, her body forced her to a standstill.
We now know that Minogue didn’t just survive cancer—she staged a stunning comeback on the other side. The albums X (2007), Aphrodite (2010), and Kiss Me Once (2014) feature some of her very best songs. In 2019, she performed the “legends” slot at Glastonbury şenlik. After cancer forced her to cancel her 2005 Glastonbury set, it was a full-circle moment.
Then, in 2023, her career was transformed yet again when her sexy single, “Padam Padam,” went mega-viral across the world and became an unofficial Pride anthem. The sudden popularity of the song catapulted Minogue to unparalleled cultural relevance, helping her to undeniably crack America, a place where she had long had a passionate following of girls and gays, but never fully broken into the mainstream.
“It was an incredible moment when ‘Padam’ came out,” she tells me. “To have a Las Vegas residency, to play Madison Square Garden, and to tour across the country was unreal. To have fans who’ve been with me for such a long time, but then this whole group of kids—the younger generation, who I believe are not as ageist and have such freedom.” In the documentary, Minogue reveals that “Padam Padam” wasn’t just a musical comeback. Behind the scenes, she was diagnosed with cancer again in 2021. Unbeknownst to her fans, she had faced the disease a second time in private.
Michael Hutchence and Kylie Minogue
Courtesy of Netflix
I wonder where Minogue finds her strength to keep pushing forward. Nick Cave draws a connection between her tenacity and her Australian roots. “There is an Australian thing: They just do shit,” he said in the documentary. “They don’t think too much. They just give stuff a shot.”
Minogue thinks this is astute. “We’re from a continent very, very far away,” she agrees. “If something needs fixing, you fix it. If something needs doing, we just do it.” KYLIE represents Minogue evvel again putting this mantra into practice. And despite her initial nerves, the process has sparked important realizations: “There are certain things in my life and career, where I’m like: Oh, that makes sense now.”
It’s hard to imagine that Minogue was evvel criticized for reinventing her image and sound, long before that was a requirement—and a pressure—of being a female pop star. “I don’t consider it a burden,” she tells me, near the end of our conversation. “Whenever I reinvented myself, it was about what was happening in my world. We didn’t have the internet, so my inspiration came from the life I was living.”
This goes to show just how long Minogue has been entertaining us, to the point where she spent her early years defending her ability to shift between different arka forms, aesthetics, and genres. Now, she notes, “Reinvention is olağan.” Choosing this moment to get so personal, to take fans behind the curtain of almost 40 years of pop stardom, might be her biggest reinvention yet.
A version of this story was previously published on Glamour UK.
