Jennifer Hudson: 'How do you be a cat? I sat with that for ever'

The Cats star was the only choice to sing Memory in the new film. She talks about lucky breaks, her 26 siblings – and the family tragedy that haunts her

The trailer for Cats was truly the gift of the summer, one which many of us have struggled to scrub from our minds. In Tom Hooper’s forthcoming version, Jennifer Hudson plays Grizabella, the shabby outcast Cat who stops the show with her rendition of Memory, alongside a cast that plays like the kind of dream you have when you’ve eaten too much cheese before bed: Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson and Idris Elba, all dancing around with digitised facial prosthetics against a not-to-scale, old‑timey London, the most disturbing aspect of which is not even that the female cats have furry boobs. But Hudson is at the heart of the film, bellowing her little heart out and looking as if she is about to go the full Joan Crawford and take a bite from the furniture.

“I think that’s the cool thing,” she says with scrupulous blandness, in reference to the wild response to the trailer, “because no one knows what to expect. It’s so exciting!” Hudson had no prior interest in the show – she knew the music, but that was it. Nothing about the material struck her as overblown, nor was she aware of the ringing piss-take tone that governed the commentary, in spite of having spent a lot of time in the UK for The Voice. What about the cat boobs?

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2sr39Rf