SONG SUNG BLUE Interview with Hugh Jackman & Kate Hudson
If someone wanted to best interpret you,
what's one thing that I would have to nail
in order to get that interpretation right?
Ooh.
Oh, oh, definitely my booty.
Booty?
It's gotta be right.
If it's not right, I'm not, you know, I'm not Kath.
I think you've got to get K.K.
That, the laugh.
The laugh is iconic.
It's like Eddie Murphy.
It's a laugh.
That's where I would start.
If I was SNLing you, it would be your laugh.
What do you think?
You don't want to be a Neil Diamond impersonator.
You want to be a Neil Diamond interpreter.
I was looking for the right way to say it
and you just came right off and said it.
From the two of you,
talk to me about a side hustle that you've had
at some point in your life that came in handy
when you were performing in this role.
My mind was being a clown at kids' parties.
I did that for about two years.
Really?
But I had zero skill.
I had, I had no balloon animals.
I could juggle.
Oh.
That was all I had.
I can't juggle.
And one kid, I remember, never forget it.
10 minutes in.
I'm like, hey kids.
And they're just looking at me like that.
And now Mike, here's the segue.
Mike and Claire performed in some really tough places
where they're getting, 10 minutes in,
this kid goes, Mom, this clown is crap.
Oh no.
Eight-year-old.
The laugh.
Wait, that's the best.
The best.
And I'm like, shut up, kid, shut up.
And he goes.
Oh my God.
He's looking at me like that.
And I used to juggle, as a last resort, eggs.
And in the end, I was like,
you guys want the eggs, you can throw eggs at me.
And the kid goes, yeah.
That was it.
I never clowned again.
I was like, I'm out.
This is not worth 50 bucks.
This is humiliating.
It like, it like, it like hurt my soul.
Yes.
It like.
It was like, dirtiest $50 I ever got.
It would be so great to be your therapist
and have to unpack that.
Exactly.
I think my life is like a side hustle.
Like, I'm always side hustling something.
You aren't.
No, you're not.
I love it.
Like, a million things I want to be doing.
You're going to do a Neil Diamond show?
A Neil Diamond experience.
One of the characters says something like,
people like us fix broken things
instead of getting new ones.
Right.
Talk to me about that concept
and how that also helped you to shape the characters
as you went throughout the process.
I think we've gotten a little bit lost
with big entertainment in terms of relatability
to a lot of this country.
And I think that it's basically that.
I think that there used to be a time,
at least in the 80s when I was growing up,
that our movies were really about like,
working class people.
I mean, even Purple Rain is like a working class movie.
It's like a guy who's living in the basement
of his parents' house.
He's dealing with like, what it's like to be an artist
and dealing with his father being abusive,
but also his father being misunderstood.
Footloose is still like a movie
that takes place in the middle of nowhere.
And it's just about people that are working
in like, grain factories and everything.
And yet they're movies that give you these big emotions
for like, very gettable finales, you know?
It's just, Prince is just gonna finally sing the song
that Wendy and Lisa wrote.
Kevin Bacon just wants to put on a dance at his high school.
But why do we go into these finales
and we feel like they're huge, like a Marvel movie?
And it's because we're just celebrating
and showing like, real stories about real people.
And I think that we just need to start getting back
to those kinds of stories for people.
Every thank you I got belongs to you, doll.
You're my August night, my September morn.
You're my crackling rosy.
And thunder!