Here are some photos from last week’s LA premiere of Love & Mercy, the authorized bio-pic of the Beach Boys’ frontman Brian Wilson. John Cusack and Paul Dano both play Brian Wilson – Dano (obviously) plays the young version, the Beach Boy, and Cusack plays the older Wilson, struggling with mental illness. Both performances are said to be excellent, and both Dano and Cusack are in the conversation for many awards, although it’s difficult to say which actor would be considered the “lead” or if both would be considered.

This feels like one of John Cusack’s first Oscar-baity drama roles in a long time, but I was looking through Cusack’s IMDB and it’s sort of amazing to see how much he works. He seems like one of those actors – a bit like Nicholas Cage – who just says “yes” to every script he’s offered, good or bad, indie or studio, whatever. I was an old-school Cusack fan back in the day. Like, I LOVED him. He was one of my favorite people ever. But in the past few years, he’s come across as… I don’t know, not really a douchebag but definitely douche-adjacent. Cusack has a new interview with The Daily Beast where he talks politics, drugs and more. Some of his quotes are thought-provoking and some are just… ugh.

He says whatever: “I just say what I think, and if people don’t like it, that’s OK…. All those people are just full of hot air and networking and stuff. If you’re speaking out about basic Rubicon lines that should or shouldn’t be crossed, if you can’t be against state-sanctioned murder being made acceptable or economic policy, making the difference between language and meaning so absurd that Orwell and Kafka laugh, these are not heavy-duty things, these are just basic, Cartesian things. They’re common sense, and were debated constitutionally a long time ago.

On Vince Vaughn saying there should be more guns in schools: “The thing is, you’d say “What schools?” and “What version of America are we talking about?” If you look at the site called HeyJackass.com it’ll tell you about how many murders have happened in Chicago, giving you weekly and monthly updates, and you can probably find out how many murders have happened in Baltimore and all over the country. That’s not the kind of debate where you want to do a tit-for-tat with what two celebrities think about it, and in order to talk about it you have to do it in an in-depth way—you need to follow the money and see what the politics are. But no, I think that’s a bad idea.

Politics: “Well, Obama has certainly extended and hardened the cement on a lot of Bush’s post-9/11 Terror Inc. policies, so he’s very similar to Bush in every way that way. His domestic policy is a bit different, but when you talk about drones, the American Empire, the NSA, civil liberties, attacks on journalism and whistleblowers, he’s as bad or worse than Bush. He hasn’t started as many wars, but he’s extended the ones we had, and I don’t even think Dick Cheney or Richard Nixon would say the president has the right to unilaterally decide whom he can kill around the world. On Tuesdays, the president can just decide whom he wants to kill, and you know, since 9/11 there are magic words like “terror,” and if you use magic words, you can justify any power grab you want.

Whether he was offered the lead on Breaking Bad: “No! Not that I’m aware of, but you never know what the agents could have done. It’s such a weird, silly thing though because why would anyone want to see that show without that actor playing it? I want him to play it, even if they offered it to me! He’s awesome.

[From The Daily Beast]

The “Obama is worse than Bush” thing is so stupid to me. It makes me feel sorry for Pres. Obama more than anything else – the Republicans’ trope has been that Obama is so crazy-liberal and he’s a socialist and a communist and he will destroy America with his crazy liberal agenda. Then the far-left people complain that Obama is too centrist, that he’s “just like Bush,” etc. No one is happy because… at the end of the day, Pres. Obama is a reasonable man trying to work with both sides. Just my opinion.

There’s also a lengthy discussion about drugs and Brian Wilson and whether great art can be achieved from taking drugs. Cusack came across pretty well in that section.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.