John Cusack, like his sister Joan, has largely stepped away from Hollywood in the past decade. It’s been a big mystery for years now. What happened, was he canceled, did he purposefully step back from his career? John has said some nutty, offensive things, but his outlandish statements weren’t enough to get him completely canceled in Hollywood. He’s questioned the Hollywood system consistently, but many older actors have as well and they still have careers. Personally, I know he’s said and done some problematic things, but I genuinely miss his presence in mid-budget comedies and dramas. When he was good, he was SO good – Grosse Point Blank, Say Anything, High Fidelity, Being John Malkovich, Hot Tub Time Machine! Well, John turned up at Comic-Con on Friday and he chatted about his absence and what he’s been working on.
John Cusack opened up about why he’s largely taken a step back from Hollywood. The “Being John Malkovich” star, 60, said he wanted to tell stories without studio executives weighing in, prompting him to write his upcoming graphic novel “Momo.”
“I always thought [graphic novels] were the closest things to film, really,” he told Variety at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday. “You’re picking out shots, they’re so cinematic.”
Cusack explained he turned to writing because he “didn’t [want to] negotiate telling a story.”
“When you ask somebody to put $20 million or $30 million into a bank account [for a film], they want to have an opinion and they’re afraid and all that stuff,” he said. Instead, he teamed up with illustrator Ignacio Noé to create “Momo” on their own terms.
“This was just like, I wrote it, and I said, ‘I like the story,’ and then I got this beautiful, wonderful artist, Ignacio Noé, to do the illustrations and so nobody edited anything I wrote or that he drew. So it’s really a piece of work that was just done by two people. It was just me and Ignacio’s story, and that doesn’t happen today. There’s no bull, and there’s no committee. There’s no computer up in Seattle that’s poll testing it.”
“Momo” — Cusack’s first graphic novel — is set to be released on Sept. 29. The story follows two fugitives in 1972 who set out to recover an ancient artifact for TV icon Jackie Gleason.
The actor spent decades as one of Hollywood’s most recognizable leading men, starring in “Grosse Pointe Blank,” “High Fidelity” and “Con Air,” but his acting career has become increasingly selective in recent years. He appeared in the 2025 films “Fog of War” and the Mandarin-language film “Detective Chinatown 1900” after starring in the Chinese espionage thriller “Decoded” in 2024. Before that, his only screen credits since 2020 were the action thriller “Pursuit” and Amazon’s dystopian series “Utopia.”
Cusack has been outspoken about the state of Hollywood for years. “My friend Joe Roth ran Disney [until 2000],” he told the Guardian in 2014. “He made things like ‘The Rock’ and ‘Con Air’ to make shareholders happy, but then he also gave six or seven slots to people he liked. I got to make ‘High Fidelity’ and ‘Grosse Pointe Blank.’ Spike Lee got to make ‘Summer of Sam.’ Wes Anderson got to make ‘Rushmore.’ I had that memory of film and that’s gone. Now it’s six for them — with a committee cutting the film who weren’t part of making it – and maybe one for you.”
It reminds me a little bit of Keanu Reeves and what could have been Keanu’s trajectory if he didn’t basically go all-in on action films to finance his more artsy ambitions. Like, John Cusack could have carved out a niche, especially given the goodwill he had from audiences, actors and many directors. But that didn’t happen. And I get it to some extent – John was always a mercurial character, even in the height of his fame and success. It’s more than likely that when he hit his late 40s and early 50s, he just gravitated towards semi-retirement anyway.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
