TWO years ago, John Cusack gave an interview to a British newspaper where he claimed he had made only ten good films.
"The ones that suck I tend to blank out," he explained. "It's like I never even made them." Now it's more like he never even said that. "That was misquoted," he says, as he kicks back in his London hotel suite for a spot of backtracking. After all, Hollywood never likes to admit failure, right? "I said, 'Ten or 15' and then I said, 'There were some good films and then there were some that are really bad.' And he (the journalist] said that I've only made ten good films and 40 suck. I never said that."
Even if he did, it's hardly a crime. Since he made his 1983 debut as a sexed-up teen in Class, Cusack has knocked out just over 50 features, which would leave him with something like a 20 per cent success rate. Not bad, particularly when you consider the likes of The Grifters, Being John Malkovich and Grosse Pointe Blank – each of them classics – would make that top ten list. He nods in agreement, chewing slightly on his bottom lip. "I actually thought it was positive. I was being realistic. It's hard to make things good."
Cusack should know. Back in 2001, he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his role as a Chicago record shop employee in High Fidelity. A perfect blend of the nerdy know-it-all and the too-cool-for-school outsider, it was quintessential Cusack playing the part he knows best, the one we love him for. Yet since then he has been floundering. There was the excellent Max, in which he played the title character, Max Rothman, an art dealer who befriends the young Adolf Hitler. But this aside, it has been lousy feeble romances (America's Sweethearts, Serendipity), thrillers (Identity, 1408, Runaway Jury) or comedies (The Ice Harvest, Must Love Dogs).
Perhaps it's that Cusack has a screen persona and he doggedly sticks to it. From his early teenage roles, he has always been the guy armed with an arsenal of wisecracks – a trait that has changed about as much as his ever-present short-back-and-sides hairstyle. Even he readily admits that he hasn't evolved a great deal. "I feel it has been a portrait of remarkable consistency or completely stunted growth, because I feel like I'm totally the same," he says. "I don't know if it's good or bad, but I don't feel much different."
All things considered, this might just be why Cusack has re-branded himself as a traditional Hollywood leading man in Roland Emmerich's 2012, his first unashamed popcorn movie since 1997's Con Air. An end-of-the-world blockbuster from the director who has already battered the planet with aliens (Independence Day) and climate change (The Day After Tomorrow), it's a wildly entertaining slice of hokum. Based around the idea that the Mayan calendar predicted the apocalypse in the titular year, Cusack plays Jackson Curtis, a struggling author who gets caught up with his family in a fight for survival as the earth is struck by all manner of natural disasters. "I had no idea what the script was about, so I started reading it and I couldn't put it down," he says, dutifully.
"It was a real page-turner. It just looked like a very big, crazy movie. There were things in it where you'd read, 'California slips into the ocean'. It would just be two or three lines, but you think, how do you film that? You kept reading things that were so surreal. So it was pretty wild. I'd never read anything like it. I never read anything that attempted that scale. It was like reading Nero burning Rome… but that's just one country."
Almost certainly 2012 will be his biggest hit since Con Air (which took around £135 million around the globe). And almost certainly, he needs it. His last three films were not even released in the UK – though you can see why he would have high hopes for all three. Martian Child, a father-son adoption story, was directed by Menno Meyjes, who helmed Max. Then War, Inc, a political satire in which he played an assassin hired to kill a Middle Eastern oil minister, was a piece he co-wrote and produced. As for Grace is Gone, which he also produced, it took the Audience Award when it made its bow at the Sundance Film Festival.
In the latter, he played Stanley Phillips, a bespectacled Midwestern father of two who loses his wife in the Iraq war. It was Cusack as we would never seen him: gone was the smooth-talker with the air of cool detachment, replaced by a grief-stricken patriot rubbed raw by emotion. It was as if, after years of playing around – playing the adolescent (everything from The Sure Thing to Say Anything) then the overgrown adolescent (in Being John Malkovich and High Fidelity) – he had finally grown up. Not that he would tell you this. "When I'm working on something like Grace is Gone, it's more satisfying than being a hired gun," he simply shrugs.
Understandably, there was talk of an Oscar nomination, yet the film took just 50,000 at the US box office. Even the might of that master Oscar campaigner Harvey Weinstein, whose company released the film in America, could do nothing. Then again, Cusack is a reluctant star at the best of times. Back then, I asked if he was prepared for a Weinstein Oscar push. "Hey, as long as he doesn't make me go to all the parties! Then I don't get the Oscar. Because you've got to go to parties to get awards." That's just not his style. "Some people," he sighed, "they'll go to a nursing home for retirees of the Academy to try and get ten votes here, ten votes there."
Now 43, Cusack is evidently not in Hollywood to win any popularity contests. But he truly finds the celebrity aspect of his job excruciating. "I do think it's better for your longevity to stay out of the limelight, the wrong kind of limelight," he says. "So I think it's smarter for people to not be in people's faces all the time. It's enough when you make a movie and you have to promote it, and there are pictures of you everywhere, and commercials and you go on talk shows. Then, when you're not in a movie, it's smart to stay away. A lot of actors get over-exposed that way."
In the past, he has been known to tell friends who have done just this – he calls it "playing with the tiger" – to pull back from the public eye or face the consequences. "How much can you really be in people's faces before they turn on you?" he reasons. "Maybe it's good for the short term, but if you want to stick around in the long term… I think it's good not to know everything about someone too. It's more interesting. You might want to figure out and watch their film. I guess people don't believe you in the parts if they know everything about you as a person. If you're a big celebrity, people remember who you are more than the parts you do. And I think that's probably not good."
As a result, Cusack is ultra-reserved when it comes to spilling details about his private life. You can see it as soon as he sits down. Dressed uniformly in black, he wears a rock-solid poker face for the most part. Only his small, dark eyes dart around the room warily.
Perhaps Cusack is right: part of his on-screen appeal is that edgy air of mystery that he seems to peddle so easily. He would certainly never fold under questioning. You can try something innocuous, for instance, what does he do in his spare time? "I don't know," he says, in a disinterested manner. "Same as everybody. You go out to dinner. You travel. You watch movies." Or you can go for the jugular: does he ever feel like starting a family? "Well, you never know."
His older sister Joan, who he has acted with in numerous films, paints a picture of her brother as the favourite uncle, however. "John's great. And he's so musical too. Whenever the boys (she has two sons] are round, he's got The Beatles going… he loves them. It's always like, 'Come, come – why don't you guys come?'"
There have been celebrity romances, of course: Minnie Driver, Neve Campbell, Claire Forlani and Alison Eastwood. But details are scant. Only Driver, his Grosse Pointe Blank co-star, broke cover, claiming he was mean to her. "I just think she should learn that certain sorts of candour are not smart," he told one interviewer. This aside, Cusack – who divides his time between Malibu and Chicago – is as clean as a whistle. As he notes, "I don't do scandals. And if I have them, they're not public." It says it all: here is a man completely in control of his life, well aware of the damage living in public can do. "There's less margin for error," he concedes. "If you do something stupid, a lot of people know about it."
So does he just try to lead a normal life off-screen? "Yeah, but it doesn't feel normal, though. I don't know. I've been interviewed since I was 17, which is not a normal thing. It doesn't really make any sense. I've had an interesting, cool, bizarre life so far."
Even so, this is part of the problem. To ensure this continues, he has been on his guard for more than half of his life. "I feel bad for these young guys who are kids, who are well-known now," he adds. "The media is so incredible… you can't even be a silly 22-year-old just because you've made a couple of movies. A guy gets drunk in a taxicab and it almost destroys his career… sounded like a good weekend to me when I was 18."
Raised in the upper-middle class area of Evanston, Illinois, Cusack demonstrated this remarkable level of caution even during his upbringing. "At school, I would get into trouble," he recalls, "but I was smart about the trouble I got into. I liked to stir things up but I always kept an escape hatch." When he was small, he wanted to be an athlete – a boxer, to be specific – but by the age of eight, he had started to act in the Piven Theatre Workshop (run by the parents of his childhood friend, Entourage star Jeremy Piven). After he made a couple of commercials, he started acting in films, and his career path was set.
Though one of five children, most of whom drifted into acting in one way or another, Cusack's upbringing was never geared towards showbusiness. Rather, politics was the order of the day. His parents were both Irish by descent and both Catholic. His mother, Nancy, was a teacher and his father, Dick, who died in 2003, a writer, actor and socially conscious documentary filmmaker. Family friends included Philip and Daniel Berrigan, major figures in the 1960s anti-war movement, and stories of their activism and regular arrests filled his ears around the dinner table.
While Cusack will point out that he has always been interested in politics – "My style is to speak out – drastically," he says, "I've never been shy about that" – he has become more vocal of late. Last year, he recorded a commercial pointing out John McCain's similarities to George W Bush. He has also recently become a regular contributor to the Huffington Post website (even interviewing No Logo author Naomi Klein on video). "I don't think about politics all the time, but it has an impact," he says. "It's part of the culture you live in. I've always thought this way."
Cusack has been particularly outspoken in his blogs about torture. An example from May this year reads, "This kind of willful collective blindness must not endure, and it must never happen again. It's not enough to be against torture, in this new political moment when speaking out against it is suddenly in vogue. All the information now so readily available contradicts all the official narratives: that we didn't know, a few bad apples, that those responsible have already been investigated and punished. And then there's the outrageous substitute for a narrative, the debate about whether or not torture works. It's a question so insane it probably makes bin Laden grin like a Cheshire cat."
Although he has yet to come under fire in the way his old friend Tim Robbins has, the left-wing Cusack immediately bristles if you question his love of his country. "I'm very patriotic. I'm just not obedient. I'm not going to be cowed by John Wayne iconography. The right wing doesn't own my country. They pretend they do, but they don't. I'm just as patriotic as any of them. I think dissent is very patriotic too," he says. "My thing is the ideologues and the policy-makers, those are the people that I…" He trails off, presumably to decide whether to finish the sentence with either "distrust" or "dislike". "It's people in power. It's never the people that serve."
With Barack Obama's first year in power fast coming to a close, Cusack remains a little disillusioned with what he has seen. "So far there's been no transformation," he says. "The Democrats aren't changing things." Yet it all fuels his work, he says. "You want to be in the now as an artist. I like thinking about different eras and different stories, but this is what's happening in the world right now. The world is a matchstick away from being on fire, if it isn't already."
Noting that Obama has to be held accountable for his failings, Cusack's willingness to discuss politics is one of the few areas where he lets his guard down. This is as close as we may ever get to finding out who he really is. As for his career, whatever happens with 2012, he has already followed it with three more films for next year: serial killer story The Factory, a 1941-set "classic noir thriller" called Shanghai and a retro-comedy entitled Hot Tub Time Machine. The latter, in which he and a bunch of loser friends are spirited back to the 1980s, is for his own company, New Crime Productions, which first produced Grosse Pointe Blank.
So is he a workaholic? "Probably, yeah," he grunts, returning to his old taciturn self. Is it hard to switch off? "Yeah. Because it ends up being a lot of work, and then you go on these press tours. So it ends up being a… It rolls on."
He lets out another sigh. Then something strange happens. Cusack actually says something quite revealing, as he explains that a friend of his has a theory: that "everybody knows everything in the world" when they're just 12 years old. "The high point of human evolution is 12," he says. "You have the great bullshit detector, and you can tell if people are full of shit and they're lying. And you have piercing insight into people, and yet the world hasn't beaten you up yet. And you haven't even had the hormones come in with puberty, so you're not boy-crazy or girl-crazy, and you're not as confused. You're like a little Buddha at 12."
He pauses for a second, a glint in his eye. "I'm just trying to get back to 12."
2012 is released on Friday (
www.whowillsurvive2012.com)
• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 08/11/09