John Cusack

John Cusack (born June 28, 1966, Evanston, Illinois, U.S.) is an American actor known for his roles in movies across genres, such as the teen drama Say Anything (1989), the romantic comedy High Fidelity (2000), the action thriller Con Air (1997), and the dark comedy Grosse Pointe Blank (1997). His father and four siblings are also actors. Cusack has one Golden Globe acting nomination for his role in the film High Fidelity. He was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2012.

Early life

Cusack was born in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, to Ann Paula (“Nancy”; née Carolan) and Dick Cusack. His mother was a math teacher, and his father was an actor and filmmaker. Cusack’s siblings Joan, Ann, Bill, and Susie are all actors. He joined Chicago’s Piven Theatre Workshop while still in elementary school and performed in several plays. Cusack went on to graduate from Evanston Township High School in 1984, and attended New York University for a year before dropping out.

Acting career in the 1980s

Cusack’s first on-screen role was in the 1980 short Why Is It Always Me?, in which he was (possibly by mistake) credited as “John Cusak.” His first major film was the 1983 comedy Class alongside Jacqueline Bisset and the Brat Pack actors Rob Lowe and Andrew McCarthy. His next film, the John Hughes-directed comedy Sixteen Candles (1984), also featured two members of the Brat Pack, Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald.

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Cusack starred in three movies in 1985: the comedies Better Off Dead and The Sure Thing, and the adventure film The Journey of Natty Gann. In 1986 he acted in the Rob Reiner film Stand by Me as well as One Crazy Summer, the latter featuring another Brat Pack member, Demi Moore. In 1988 he played Chicago White Sox infielder Buck Weaver in Eight Men Out, a film based on the 1919 Black Sox gambling scandal.

Cusack’s most memorable role of the 1980s was in the 1989 film Say Anything, in which he played the 22-year-old Lloyd Dobler, a character who has just completed high school and is interested in the class valedictorian Diane (Ione Skye). A New York Times review of the film praised Cusack’s acting, saying “Mr. Cusack…is one of the most accomplished, self-assured young actors around.” An enduring scene from the film features Cusack in a trenchcoat outside Diane’s house, holding a boombox over his head and blasting the Peter Gabriel song “In Your Eyes.” The scene has been referenced and parodied multiple times in pop culture, including in episodes of Family Guy and The Simpsons.

1990s and beyond

Cusack didn’t feature in any memorable roles in the early 1990s. Quentin Tarantino had written the role of the drug dealer Lance in his 1994 film Pulp Fiction for Cusack, but the role eventually went to Eric Stolz. But his career picked up in the second half of the decade when Cusack shared screen space with Al Pacino and Bridget Fonda in the 1996 political thriller City Hall. In 1997 Cusack acted in Con Air as an FBI agent; the film also featured Nicolas Cage and John Malkovich. That same year, he had a voice role in the Oscar-nominated animated film Anastasia, and he played a professional assassin who attends his high school reunion in the film Grosse Pointe Blank. Cusack co-wrote the screenplay for the film. In 1998 Cusack appeared in Terrence Malick’s war drama The Thin Red Line with Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Adrien Brody, and George Clooney; the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards.

In 1999 Cusack played the role of a puppeteer who chances upon a portal into the mind of actor John Malkovich in the acclaimed film Being John Malkovich; the Spike Jonze-directed film also starred Cameron Diaz and Malkovich as a fictional version of himself.

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For his starring role as a record store owner in High Fidelity (2000), Cusack was nominated for a Golden Globe. He then appeared in the romantic comedies America’s Sweethearts (2001) with Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Billy Crystal, and Serendipity (2001) opposite Kate Beckinsale. Other movies he has appeared in include horror film 1408 (2007), raunchy comedy Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), and crime drama The Raven (2012), in which he portrayed writer Edgar Allan Poe. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2012, but his career has been on the decline since then. He appeared in his first TV series, the Amazon Prime series Utopia in 2020.

Social media and activism

Cusack has been an outspoken liberal commentator on social media; he has 1.7 million followers on X (formerly Twitter), has served on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation since it was set up in 2012, and used to write opinion pieces for The Huffington Post. He has been especially critical of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump and his policies, and described himself as “shivering in revulsion” after a 2003 interaction with the latter. He has often been in trouble for his posts: In 2019 he publicly apologized for an antisemitic meme that he retweeted (and subsequently deleted) while defending his position as anti-Israel and not antisemitic.

In 2015 Cusack traveled to Moscow where he, along with Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy and activist Daniel Ellsberg, met American whistleblower Edward Snowden. The 2016 book Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations was co-written by Roy and Cusack based on this meeting. In 2020 Cusack was attacked and pepper sprayed by Chicago police while filming protests that had erupted in the city in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.