Alexander Larman
In the early hours of Tuesday October 8, a 58-year-old man offered a unique perspective on politics on X. He tweeted: “Many years ago in 1984 Jerry Adams was gunned down by Margaret Thatcher – he survived. The idea that the Irish would someday kick the British the f___ out of Ireland would have been thought impossible. Untill [sic] it wasn’t.” The tweeter then concluded: “Justice will come for Palestine.”
The remarks were greeted with a mixture of surprise and uproarious contempt by his followers, who lost little time in informing him that Gerry (not Jerry) Adams had been shot by loyalist paramilitaries, rather than the British state (or indeed the Iron Lady herself), and that Northern Ireland remained part of Great Britain, as it had done since 1921.
It is easy to suggest that the social media warrior could be forgiven his ignorance on the grounds that he was American, and therefore not necessarily abreast of the intricacies of British politics. This would be fair, were it not for a glance at his account; interspersed with furious remarks about the forthcoming US election are a screed of anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian tweets, retweets of Jeremy Corbyn and Roger Waters and a general sense of deep dissatisfaction with the world as it stands. This, it is quite clear, is someone who is very angry indeed, and his bio does little to convince people otherwise – “apocalyptic s___ disturber and elephant trainer.”
Everyone is entitled to their opinions, and social media can be a lively place. Yet the surprising thing about the account of the actor, screenwriter and political activist John Cusack is less that he has posted a total of 220,000 times, but more that he has gone on one of the most spectacular journeys in contemporary Hollywood. He has had at least three distinct acts in his acting career, consisting firstly of his being the go-to actor for writer-directors who wanted to find an unusually mature young performer who could convey angst, intelligence and yearning with grace.
He then settled into a decade or so’s work as a mainstream leading man, moving with ease between mainstream and independent cinema. Yet since then, he has all but abandoned stardom in favour of obscure films you’re unlikely to have heard of and a newfound career as an internet campaigner; some might say provocateur. What, exactly, happened to John Cusack?
He was born into a large Irish Catholic family with artistic leanings; his father Dick was a documentary maker and actor who later had small roles in several of his son’s films, including Eight Men Out and High Fidelity, and his elder sisters Ann and Joan are also actors. Cusack quit New York University after a year in favour of pursuing a full-time acting career, and had a succession of minor parts in such seminal Eighties pictures as John Hughes’s debut, Sixteen Candles, and the early Brat Pack film Class.
He had his first lead in Rob Reiner’s 1985 comedy The Sure Thing, in which the 18-year-old Cusack played high school student Walter Gibson, heading across America to lose his virginity to “the sure thing” of the title, only to find love with his unlikely travelling companion. The film had its fair share of sex-based humour, but it was a considerably different endeavour to the likes of Porky’s or Risky Business, with Cusack’s nuanced, sympathetic performance marking him out as an actor to watch.
He had a fine run of similar opportunities throughout the Eighties and early Nineties, finding an iconic part in Cameron Crowe’s 1989 romantic comedy Say Anything… as the lovelorn Lloyd Dobler, desperately and apparently fruitlessly besotted with the most attractive and successful girl in his class. The film’s most iconic scene saw Cusack’s character hold up a boombox outside his would-be inamorata’s window, playing Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes in an attempt to convince her of his undying affection.
The success of this and The Sure Thing marked Cusack out as an actor unusually skilled at playing vulnerable and flawed romantic leads. That he spent a considerable amount of time in interviews extolling the music that he enjoyed listening to – it was at his suggestion that Say Anything… contained references in the script to The Clash and The Replacements – meant that he was one of the rare actors of his generation who had cultural standing as well as box office cachet. John Cusack wascool.
It was this sense of indie hip that he traded on for much of the early Nineties, with roles in everything from the Martin Scorsese-produced, Stephen Frears-directed crime drama The Grifters, in which he held his own opposite Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening, to the Woody Allen comedy Bullets Over Broadway, in which Cusack proved himself an expert at taking the frantic, arm-waving comedy of many Allen stand-in protagonists and toning it down, making his naïve young playwright an unusually likeable hero.
Yet his finest hour was still to come, in the form of the 1997 comedy-thriller Grosse Pointe Blank. Cusack played the ice-cold assassin Martin Blank, who reluctantly attends a 10-year high school reunion, only to be embroiled in shenanigans both romantic and homicidal. It may be the most violent romantic comedy ever made, or the sweetest-natured and funniest crime thriller, but Cusack stole the film from an impressive cast (including his former girlfriend Minnie Driver and the great Alan Arkin) as a man as witty as he is deadly. Whenever he’s on screen, he stole the show entirely.
Much the same could be said of his performance in the knowingly absurd blockbuster Con Air, in which Cusack imbued his sandal-wearing US Marshal with a suitably counter-cultural air of irreverence. He thenall but disowned the film afterwards, suggesting that he had had to improvise his dialogue and that the only reason he took the part was to give him greater clout to make personal projects. Which, for a while, he was able to; he was sufficiently bankable to be cast in the lead of Being John Malkovich, reuniting with Malkovich after Con Air, and worked with the likes of Clint Eastwood, Terrence Malick and Tim Robbins.
He returned to the romantic comedy genre several times, most successfully in the Nick Hornby adaptation High Fidelity, in which he portrayed the man-boy owner of a record store, and had a lucrative line in starring in thrillers, including the John Grisham adaptation The Runaway Jury and James Mangold’s tricksy Identity. All Hollywood seemed to be at his feet, if he wanted it to be.
The critic Roger Ebert once said of Cusack “he has made 55 films, and not one is bad”. This swiftly changed from the mid-2000s, when the once selective actor now started to appear in a deluge of generic fare. Some were at least big-budget, like Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie 2012, and he was amusingly seedy as a villain in the camp classic The Paperboy. Yet the once-charming mainstay of romantic comedies now seemed an increasingly angry presence off-screen, too.
He began writing politically themed op-eds, and although it was little surprise to discover that Cusack was a card-carrying man of the Left – he was an actor, after all – it may have alienated Hollywood when he declared in 2015 that “when you talk about drones, theAmerican Empire, the NSA, civil liberties, attacks on journalism andwhistleblowers, Obama is as bad or worse than Bush.”
He was a supporter of Edward Snowden, writing a book with Arundhati Roy called Things That Can and Cannot Be Said based on conversations with the fugitive. He was an outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders. And the film roles became worse and worse, until they virtually dried up.
There was the occasional bright spot, such as his appearance in David Cronenberg’s 2014 Maps to the Stars as a Machiavellian psychologist, and he was excellent as the older Brian Wilson in the biopic Love & Mercy the same year. Yet he seemed in danger of going the same way as his regular co-star Nicolas Cage, without the possibility of a redemptive arc. Cage, for all his absurd financial profligacy and eccentricity, remains a well-liked figure in Hollywood, given chance after chance at comebacks and renewed audience appreciation. Cusack, by way of contrast, seems fated to remain a washed-up presence, grimly tweeting away at night and remaining bitterly cynical about Hollywood, a place that he called “a whorehouse…[where] people go mad.”
The last project of any stature he took on was the US remake of the Channel 4 series Utopia, in which he played an Elon Musk-esque founder of a shady biotech company. Cusack gave a candid interview to the Guardian around the time of the show’s release, in which he blasted Donald Trump as “an evil f___ [who] grinds our faces in it every day”, and remained philosophical about his waning career.
“I haven’t really been hot for a long time,” Cusack admitted the last few years, I haven’t been able to get projects financed. That could be a function of getting older. Or it could be a function of being cold.” For good measure, he described filmmaking as “brutal, transactional, superficial and dumb.” The show was not a success, and was not commissioned for a second series.
In the same interview, Cusack suggested that his rage was circumstantial, saying “I wouldloveto think about other things. Poetry. Love. Anything else. But that’s just not the times we’re in…I really just want to get across the message: that we’re sleepwalking into an incredibly dark possible future.”
It's amazing the amount of frenzy this creates -
— John Cusack (@johncusack) October 11, 2024
Just to hold multiple truths - https://t.co/D1wIw9Vlws
Since then, matters have only worsened, and so has his anger. His views on the Israel-Palestine conflict have been sufficiently virulent for him to be labelled “Antisemite of the Week” by the group Stop Antisemitism, which he called “a list of lies”; those reading his feed on X may have their own opinions as to the nature of his views.
He is no great admirer of Biden or Kamala Harris, but reserves special hatred for Trump. In 2020 he said that he would no longer speak to anyone not aggressively opposed to the former president, and that “those who cannot see or choose not to see what [Trump] is, we are done talking – permanently.”
Come this November, there may be many more people in that camp, which will doubtless send this great but frustrating actor into another paroxysm of rage. But there’s always X, and the opportunity to send out late-night screeds of anger on that, tweeting and retweeting away, and ignoring the fact that the platform is owned by his bête noire (and Trump supporter) Elon Musk. Those of us hoping that he has more great acting work left in him may be waiting a while yet.