🎧 Kate Hudson Is Still ‘Game for Anything’
25 years after ‘Almost Famous,’ the Oscar nominee talks about her ‘Aries’ energy facing ‘tornado’ Hugh Jackman in ‘Song Sung Blue’
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In Song Sung Blue, Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play a pair of Milwaukee-based singers — based on a real-life couple — who form a Neil Diamond tribute band called Lighting & Thunder and fall in love in the process. But describing the dynamic between her and Jackman in real life, Hudson opts for a different weather metaphor.
“Hugh will come in like a tornado — he blows in and is gone,” Hudson, 46, tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “I’m more like the hurricane — I come in, and then I stay. I’m like, ‘Let’s keep going!’ And he’s like, ‘I’m going to bed and then to work out.’”
Hudson and Jackman’s boundless energy is one of many interesting things about Song Sung Blue, an unconventional kind of musical biopic in which the star is not Diamond himself but two ordinary people who become local celebrities by covering him — or “interpreting” him, in the parlance they would prefer. Written and directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Dolemite Is My Name), the movie is based on the real story of Mike and Claire Sardina, the Milwaukee couple who overcame great adversity after Claire was involved in an accident. I’m being vague to protect the film’s twists, but Song Sung Blue is based on a 2008 documentary of the same name, and Claire’s situation is heavily telegraphed in the film’s most recent trailer.
Hudson and Jackman both had their breakthrough roles in 2000 — she with her Oscar-nominated turn in Almost Famous and he as Wolverine in X-Men — but they’ve never worked together, and didn’t really even know each other before Song Sung Blue came along.
It was after an unusually emotional table read of the script — “maybe there was one person who didn’t really cry,” Hudson remembers — that she spoke to Jackman and laid out the stakes of the film for both of them.
“I went up to Hugh and was like, ‘This movie only works if we work,’” Hudson tells me. “I want to make sure we’re setting ourselves up for an environment where we can feel really comfortable with each other. You know, I’m an Aries. I get in there, I’m aggressive. I’m game for anything, but I didn’t know Hugh — I was like, ‘I don’t know where your boundaries are.’”
The two stars build a compelling romance, buttressed by Diamond hits like “Sweet Caroline” and “Cherry, Cherry,” but Hudson is the film’s revelation. As Claire, a single mother who performs as a Patsy Cline “interpreter,” meets Jackman’s Mike, Hudson captures both the pain of the life this woman has been handed and the unbridled joy she feels when performing. As Hudson tells me, that was the part of the character she connected to easily. “The most relatable thread to Claire and me is this intense need and desire and love for music — having to sing and the joy that you feel when you sing,” Hudson says. “That’s your happy place. For Claire and me, it’s the same.”
On today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, Hudson tells me about how she and Jackman broke down those boundaries together, how she feels these days when looking back at what’s now a 25-year film career and a life in the industry (her mother, of course, is Goldie Hawn) and the surprising logistical challenges of promoting a movie that opens on Christmas Day. A special bonus for those of you who watch the YouTube version: Hudson’s fireplace mantle in the background, spectacularly decorated for Christmas.
The podcast also includes the conversation I had with Christopher Rosen just hours ago, recorded immediately after the Oscar shortlists were announced on Tuesday afternoon. Who just got a boost in their campaign, and who is really going to need to scramble? Tune in to find out!
And one more reminder: This Friday, Chris and I will be hosting a live mailbag episode of Prestige Junkie After Party, answering your burning questions about this Oscar season, Oscar races past, the movies of 2025 or 2026, or really anything else on your mind. Please send me your questions at katey@theankler.com or tune in live to ask us then!
Totally different than whatever Penske’s running!