Hugh Jackman on playing Neil Diamond: "Singing is like this fast-track to vulnerability"

Song Sung Blue, directed by Craig Brewer, tells the story of Mike and Claire Sardina, two middle-aged Milwaukee performers, whose lives are transformed through their devotion to the music of Neil Diamond. Adapted from a documentary about the real couple, the film explores the way Diamond’s catalogue becomes a lifeline, far beyond the ubiquity of ‘Sweet Caroline’.

It also examines how two people carrying their own histories, heartbreaks and private battles discover a shared joy, which feels both improbable and necessary. Brewer’s film is less about fandom than the profound way music can steady a life. In the hands of Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, it becomes a portrait of love forged, not in glamour, but in small rooms, second chances and the stubborn belief that performing, even in miniature, is a form of salvation.

Hudson, who has been publicly embracing her long-held musical instincts in recent years, releasing her debut album Glorious in 2024, describes her relationship to singing as something that reaches deep into her sense of self.

“This might sound really woo-woo, but for me, it’s ancestral,” she says. “I feel a deep connection to my father, my real father, and that lineage. When I’m singing, or when I’m at the piano, I feel like it’s where I meet the Hudsons or the Salernos. It’s a long lineage of music.”

The actress’ affection for performing began early, and she expresses it with the openness that has long defined her public persona.

“The performer in me, since I was a little girl, was like, ‘If there’s a light and it’s on a stage, I want to be singing!’” she says. “The connection for me in this movie with Claire, is that for her too, there’s nothing else. I mean, she can be a hairdresser. But what moves her, what keeps her alive – what keeps her going and joyful – is being able to sing in any way, however she can do it.”

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson in Song Sung Blue.

For Jackman, who has built a career dancing between blockbusters and musical theatre, singing and acting have become deeply intertwined, even though he arrived at them in opposite ways.

“They’re one and the same to me, because I came to singing through acting,” he says. But he does remark that singing demands complete honesty.

“Ultimately, singing is like this fast-track to vulnerability. You have to show up. Whether you’re scared or confident, it’s gonna expose everything you’re feeling. What I’ve learned is don’t try and hide that.”

That vulnerability was essential in playing Mike, a man scarred by war, addiction and the fear that he’s one step from losing the woman who gives his life shape. Jackman explains that he begins each role by considering what parts of a person must be understood before anything can be hidden.

“I love Mike, and I always start every character by asking, ‘What do I need to know to play this person?’” he says. “So for Mike, obviously his experience growing up or going to Vietnam, or coming back with his addictions, all those battles there – what I could see in him was this pain of determination.”

His fragility, Jackman notes, is not something the film treats delicately.

“He’s on a knife edge, physically with his heart, but also just emotionally,” he continues. “He’s gone to the depths, and Neil Diamond has helped him through some of that. He’s just determined to take one step in front of the other.”

When Mike and Claire meet, Mike is sober and they’re both upbeat. In the first act, we see two fundamentally good people find love later in life. It’s not until an accident threatens everything that Mike’s lust for life begins to crumble.

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson in Song Sung Blue.

“What I love,” says Jackman, “is it’s almost like the break in him comes when he realises they may not be able to be a duo anymore.”

The film’s devotion to Neil Diamond’s music is not nostalgic shorthand, but an emotional code. Hudson admits she discovered the breadth of Diamond’s songwriting only while preparing for the role.

“I actually really discovered Neil’s music in this film,” she says. “I knew it through certain cinema, like Pulp Fiction and Beautiful Girls, but I didn’t really understand how prolific a writer Neil Diamond was until we got into the catalogue.”

For Mike and Claire, the songs become a marriage in themselves, a way to express what words alone cannot. The couple fall in love to ‘Play Me’, rediscover faith in ‘Holly Holy’, and ‘Soolaimon’ becomes a creative hymn. But despite the prevalence of Diamond’s songs, for Hudson, the strongest memories of the shoot revolve around moments where silence said more than dialogue.

“Sometimes my favourite moments in movies are ones that have no words,” she says. “They’re just an exchange of energy and connection. There’s this moment when he turns around and we look at each other, and it’s like the rebalancing of Claire. It’s like Claire’s finally, mentally and physically, found the new version of her life with him.”

The film is a love letter to music and performing without the big rewards. Though the duo find success, there are a lot of lounge and bar gigs, lots of fallow periods where they don’t perform, and the struggle of making ends meet. Offscreen, both actors talk about choosing a creative life long before it offered rewards.

Hudson remembers being challenged as a child by Kurt Russell, her mother Goldie Hawn’s longtime partner, to consider whether she would pursue performing, even if it meant a life outside the industry’s spotlight.

“I declared that I wanted to be an actor when I was 11,” she says. “It was like, ‘If I told you that you were going to be in community theatre your whole life, that you were never going to make a dime as an actor, would you still want it?’ I was like, 1,000%.”

Jackman shares a similar conviction.

“I would definitely be doing it,” he says. “I got my first job at 26, and I did another whole degree to be a journalist. I was doing it when I was in high school – we would put on plays.”

Brewer’s film asks what it means to hold onto a dream long past the point when others might have let it go, and why two people battered by life still choose to step onto a stage, as if the world might open for them again.

It is a love story, a musical, and a reminder that a song can be both a memory and a promise – and that sometimes, two ordinary people can turn Neil Diamond’s catalogue into a map back to themselves.

• Song Sung Blue is in cinemas from January 1.