Career
Cusack gained fame in the mid-1980s after appearing in teen movies such as Better Off Dead, The Sure Thing, One Crazy Summer, and Sixteen Candles. Cusack made a cameo in the 1988 music video for "Trip At The Brain" by Suicidal Tendencies. In 1989 he starred as Lloyd Dobler in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything.... His roles broadened in the late 1980s and early 1990s with more serious-minded fare such as the politically themed True Colors and the film noir thriller The Grifters. He was later offered the role of the title character of Fred in the film Drop Dead Fred, but dropped out due to a death in his family.
Cusack experienced box office success with his roles in the dark comedy Grosse Pointe Blank and the Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster Con Air. In the years since, his range of films has diversified, appearing in roles such as an obsessive puppeteer in Being John Malkovich, a lovelorn record store owner in High Fidelity, and a Jewish art dealer mentoring a young Adolf Hitler in Max. He starred in the horror film 1408, based on Stephen King's short story of the same name. He next appeared as a widowed father in the Iraq War-themed drama Grace is Gone and as assassin Brand Hauser in the dark political satire, War, Inc., along with Hilary Duff and Marisa Tomei.
His sister Joan Cusack and close friend Jeremy Piven have appeared in many of his films. The siblings appeared as two geeks in Sixteen Candles: John as one of Farmer Ted's posse, and Joan as the geek with the neck brace. They also appeared together in Say Anything, Grosse Pointe Blank, High Fidelity, Cradle Will Rock, Martian Child, and War, Inc.. Piven and Cusack play opposite one another in One Crazy Summer, Serendipity, Say Anything, and Grosse Pointe Blank. Cusack also had a brief cameo, seen from behind but speaking a line of dialogue, in Broadcast News, in which Joan also appeared. Piven also had roles in The Grifters and Runaway Jury.
Cusack was next seen in Roland Emmerich's disaster film 2012, which was released in theaters November 13, 2009; he played Jackson Curtis, a struggling novelist and limo driver, with his Identity and Martian Child co-star Amanda Peet. In 2010, Cusack starred in Hot Tub Time Machine, opposite Rob Corddry, Clark Duke, and Craig Robinson. In the 2012 thriller film The Raven, Cusack portrayed Edgar Allan Poe.
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