John Cusack has confirmed he came close to landing the role of John Bender in John Hughes’ 1985 classic “The Breakfast Club,” a part that ultimately went to Judd Nelson.
“No, I think there was one time at one point where I think he thought he wanted me to do it and I think I would I would have done it,” Cusack told Josh Horowitz on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast on Monday. “I thought it was a cool script, but it didn’t go that way.”
Nelson went on to star in the film alongside Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, and Emilio Estevez. Cusack did work with Hughes on another of his Brat Pack films, playing Bryce in 1984’s “Sixteen Candles,” which also featured Ringwald and Hall.
Asked about being a teen idol in that era, Cusack, now 60, credited his parents for keeping him level-headed. “I hadn’t done anything, so I was never going to buy the hype or anything. I wanted to work with great people and do great movies, but I knew I hadn’t done anything yet,” he said.
He said his father, actor Dick Cusack, drilled a different mindset into him early on. “To be a celebrity is death for an artist. Like, you know, he was always about like, what’s the script, what’s the part, what’s this thing saying, right?” Cusack said, adding that the lesson stuck. “I didn’t take any of that stuff seriously as a teen.”
“Sixteen Candles” was an early stepping stone for Cusack, who went on to build a decades-long career with roles in “Stand By Me,” “Con Air,” “Grosse Pointe Blank,” “The Thin Red Line,” “Being John Malkovich,” “High Fidelity,” and “2012.”
Cusack also weighed in on the current state of American film, saying that while movies coming out of other countries are often “awesome,” he thinks domestic cinema has gone “flat.” He pointed back to his 1989 film “Say Anything,” whose producer had worked on “seminal, amazing films” like “Paper Moon” and “The Last Picture Show.”
“Her mindset wasn’t ‘How are we going to, you know, make the most money and who am I going to connect with here,'” Cusack said. “It was like different values.”
