You might know John Cusick from the acting he’s done. Not in “Must Love Dogs”—that’s that other guy—but in “The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged” and on his weekly radio drama. Or you might have read his college guidebook. Or maybe you saw him in his first Gag Reflex show on Friday. If you were really lucky, maybe you ran into him celebrating his 21st birthday this weekend. Either way, the guy is unavoidable, and has thoughts to share on everything from Orson Welles to peaking at age 21.
So how does it feel to be 21?
It’s fantastic. It’s so great. I feel completely different. The funny thing is that I haven’t even purchased any alcohol yet, but just knowing that I could is really liberating. My friends got me very, very drunk last weekend on pretty good scotch whiskey. I’m slowly becoming a whiskey aficionado.
Toby [Shaw ’07, the Argus photo editor] said she saw you on Saturday and told you about being WesCeleb and you were very excited. Why?
Around about early sophomore year I kind of came to terms with my own shallow, attention craving personality and realized, wow, to be Wesceleb would really make me happy. I mentioned that to some people that I was having dinner with at the time that it was my dream to be Wesceleb. And now here I am. I’ve peaked at 21.
How has being in Gag Reflex been so far? [John just joined the group this semester]
It’s been great. The group is so welcoming and so supportive. It’s very much like a family.
And how about the first show this weekend?
The first couple of seconds onstage I was absolutely petrified, which I didn’t expect. My heart was completely racing. But then Jesse tagged me in for the first scene and it went off better than both of us expected.
What do you like about improv?
It’s pure fun. I have a lot of theater friends who wouldn’t like to hear me say this, but it’s the best parts of theater, which for me have always been when people screw up or make stuff up onstage.
What else are you involved in right now?
I am producing a weekly live radio drama series with Rory Bradley [’07]. We write a script a week and perform it live in the studio.
Is it like Orson Welles style radio?
That’s definitely the inspiration. The most recent script we did was poking fun at radio dramas. It was about a flailing and none-too-talented radio drama group. It was sort of a meta-drama, if I can be that pretentious.
What brought you to work on this show?
I’ve been with WESU since freshman year. Up until this year I’ve been doing sort of a social commentary kind of show with Rory. We’re both on the board this year and we wanted to do something different and take our actual radio program up a notch. This seemed sort of the most logical place to go. We’re both big old-time radio fans. There’s a lot of humor in it, a lot of spontaneity. It’s a very intimate medium. I envision audience members listening in at home by themselves with the lights turned off.
And you and I are both helping write the Wesleyan melodrama. Describe how it’s going so far.
It’s still very much in the formative stages, so I don’t want to say very much about what it’s going to be about. A couple of ideas that are being thrown around are whores, space, and space whores. I saw it last year and I only went to go see it because I had a huge crush on Sarah Elmaleh [’07] and she was in it. It completely surprised me because it was really fantastic and funny. It made me really proud to go to this school, that students would set up something like this of their own initiative.
Anything else you’re working on?
I’m working on a novel. It’s a kind of existential family drama, which is the stupid answer. The good answer is that it’s about a man who begins to suffer symptoms of schizophrenia in mid-life and about how that affects his family.
Why decide to work on this during college?
In my heart that’s what I want to do. There’s no reason to wait on doing what you want to do with your life.
Do you feel like it’s making you crazy?
I never feel like I have enough time to work on it. It’s like caring for an infant. It needs constant attention or else it will fall apart and scream at you. In that sense it’s driving me nuts, but it’s such a labor of love.
I think the obvious question I have to ask about your relationship with John Cusack.
People always ask me, ‘Does it annoy you when people ask you if you’re related to John Cusack?’ It never has. I don’t know why. But it’s starting to, after 21 years of life it’s starting to get to me. It’s actually the same name, it’s just one of those Ellis Island misspelling things.
Do you even like John Cusack?
I don’t particularly like his movies. “High Fidelity” was kind of funny but that was mostly because of Jack Black. I just recently saw a video clip of him reading at a party in honor of Hunter S. Thompson, so that makes him a little cooler. He’s no great shakes but I’m sure he’s a nice guy.
Were your parents aware of this connection when they named you?
I guess I can reveal a big secret here. All of my mother’s friends were naming their kids initials, like J.P. and A.J. She decided to name her kid two names just out of spite. She actually named me John-Michael. Maybe it’s time now that I’ve officially entered legal adulthood to go out and enter the world as John-Michael.
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