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 John Cusack
Interview By: Michael Dance John Cusack is a versatile actor, but if he has a common persona, it's of the fast-talking heartbreaker - seen as both a teenager (Lloyd Dobler, Say Anything) and an adult (Rob Gordon, High Fidelity), a dope (Craig Schwartz, Being John Malkovich) and a wiseacre (Martin Blank, Grosse Pointe Blank). But never, not once in his fifty-six acting credits, has he played a father. Until now, in his new movie Martian Child. "I have ultimate respect for the weight of parenthood," the unattached Cusack says, noting that he isn't ruling out ever becoming a parent for real. "I would never take it lightly. Total selflessness. It's pretty incredible. I watched a lot of my friends and family do it and stuff. I've been watching. So hopefully when I do it I'll be ready." In the film, Cusack adopts a quiet eight-year-old boy who claims he's from Mars, played by unknown Bobby Coleman. "Bobby's an amazing kid, he's really amazing. He's eerily professional -- pretty accomplished, you know? So he came in, and he had his own point of view, you'd talk to him and he'd go, no Dennis wouldn't do this. He had it all mapped out, in a way. Never was in a bad mood, he never got tired - he was amazing. I mean, a couple of times I saw him and he was a kid and he was tired, sleeping on his father's shoulder. I'd think, my God, the kid's eight or nine years old." Cusack has nothing but respect for his own parents - sadly, there are no dark tales of abuse or neglect or even divorce. "They said, it's not important to make everybody like you. So I don't know how we became actors," Cusack laughs. "But their mantra was that Joseph Campbell thing about: follow your bliss. It's worked out to some degree. But they didn't push us in one direction, they just tried to expose us to a lot of stuff and support us. So they were great, great parents. I was very lucky." So what's the trick to working with kids? "I think being vulnerable is the whole deal in movies," he says. "It's hard to do, but you know, a friend of mine, the terrific actor and one of my dear friends John McGinley [Dr. Cox on Scrubs] has a son with special needs, and I've watched that over the last eight years change his life, and watched how selfless he's become. You realize, we goff and do our things and we want to do our stuff and be heroic in these traditional ways, and then you see parents being heroic in their way every day. It really is amazing." Of course, now that he's played a father once, the floodgates have opened: this December, he'll star in Grace is Gone, about a widow who doesn't ... |
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