How Kate Hudson Tapped Into Playing a Neil Diamond Tribute Band Singer

All Kate Hudson needed to get in touch with her music roots was some hair rollers. 

In Song Sung Blue (in theaters Dec. 25), Hudson plays singer Claire Sardina, known as one half of Neil Diamond tribute band, Lightning and Thunder. “Everything that I’ve studied throughout my life or my career, I get to do in one film,” she says while speaking to outlets including PEOPLE at the film’s Sunday, Oct. 26 AFI Fest premiere. “And that doesn’t happen very often.”

Hudson, 46, “really connected with Claire,” the actress-musician shares. “I think it was the hair — the second my hot rollers went in and came out, I just felt like a completely different person.”

Milwaukee, Wisconsin native Claire, 63, toured the country with bandmate-turned-husband Mike Sardina starting in the late 1980s. Writer-director Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue, costarring Hugh Jackman as Mike a.k.a. Lightning, captures that time period and all its fashion — including Claire’s feathery perm. (When first-look images were unveiled, many saw similarities between Hudson’s new ’do and her mother Goldie Hawn’s signature style!)

“There’s something about Claire, she has this love for life,” says Hudson, adding that she hopes the real-life woman behind the biopic is “happy” with her depiction. 

“Even in the darkest moments, when you get to know her, she just powers through with this light and joy,” she said. “There’s something about that energy that I just tapped into a little bit.”

The other musician Hudson has gotten to know, of course, is Diamond — “a real dream,” she says. The legendary singer-songwriter, 84, “brings people together. It’s this kind of music [that’s] so American, and then at the same time, it just makes people happy. There’s something about the songs that he writes. It makes people want to put their arms around each other and sing it.”

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Ella Anderson, who in the movie plays Rachel Cartwright, Claire’s daughter from her first marriage, tells PEOPLE that it was “spectacular” watching Hudson sing Diamond’s songs on set. “I was amazed by how much that she just threw herself into Claire.”

Song Sung Blue is in theaters Dec. 25. Among Hudson’s other upcoming projects is the second season of Netflix comedy Running Point, expected in spring 2026.