In January 2010, Gidley was named in the NRL All Stars team to play on 13 February 2010. He was voted as the Knight's representative after beating Ben Cross, Chris Houston and Jarrod Mullen. Kurt suffered a knee injury in the game which left him sidelined until Round 6 of the 2010 season. For the 2010 ANZAC Test, Gidley was selected to play for Australia from the interchange bench in their victory against New Zealand. On 7 May, 28 minutes into the Test match, starting Australian Cameron Smith came off the field with a shoulder injury, which led to Kurt coming on and playing dummy half for the rest of the game. On 17 May 2010 Gidley was named as and captain of the New South Wales Blues. For the first time in Origin history, Gidley captained the side from the reserves bench for Game 2. During a team bonding session on 10 June 2010 Gidley's ex teammate and friend Andrew Johns who at the time was the NSW assistant coach caused controversy when it emerged that he had encouraged a player to attack Queensland player Greg Inglis, referring to him as a "black cunt". Gidley defended Andrew Johns as not a racist and stipulated that "He's obviously still going to be a great mate of mine." Game 3 of the 2010 State of Origin series saw Gidley again starting from the bench, and this time stripped of his captaincy. Gidley came on to replace Michael Ennis after 30 minutes and went on to play the rest of the game. Just before half-time, Gidley set up an inside pass for Paul Gallen to crash over the try line for New South Wales first try of the game. In the 47th minute, Kurt scored the next try for the Blues which narrowed the point deficit to just one. He continued to make several linebreaks and defended strong. Gidley was later awarded the Brad Fittler Medal for NSW's Player of the Series. At the end of the 2010 season, Gidley was selected to play for Australia for the Four Nations Tournament. He played in 3 out of the 4 games and played in the final against New Zealand. He played the whole 2nd half of the final in the s due to a knee injury to teammate Brent Tate.