John Cusack revealed that after watching his films get “butchered” for years, he was convinced it was time to step away from Hollywood and tell stories on his own terms.
Keep reading to learn the whole story!
Once one of Hollywood’s biggest leading men, 60-year-old John Cusack spent years starring in hit films including Stand By Me, Serendipity and High Fidelity, the 2000 movie that earned him a Golden Globe nomination.
But as major roles became harder to come by and projects repeatedly fell apart, the outspoken critic of Donald Trump quietly stepped away from the spotlight.
Looking back, he said the frustrations of modern filmmaking ultimately pushed him toward a different kind of storytelling.
‘Haven’t really been hot for a long time’
Speaking with The Guardian in 2020, Cusack admitted he had struggled to get projects off the ground.
“I haven’t really been hot for a long time,” he confessed. “In the last few years, I haven’t been able to get projects financed. That could be a function of getting older. Or it could be a function of being cold.”
Even when projects did move forward, he said the finished product often looked very different from the one he had signed up to make.
“You may go make a film…You do all this work. And the movie sort of gets butchered in the editing room,” Cusack, who produced and starred in 2010’s Hot Tub Time Machine, told the outlet. “And that happens, like…nine times out of 10? So, it’s not a very satisfying thing, if only one in 10 movies that you’re making work out the way they were planned.”
Summing up his experience, the actor described moviemaking as “brutal, transactional, superficial and dumb.”
Making ‘Momo’
Those frustrations help explain why Cusack’s latest project looks nothing like the films that made him famous.
In a conversation with Variety during San Diego Comic-Con on July 24, the star of Must Love Dogs explained why creating his first graphic novel, “Momo,” allowed him to tell the story exactly as he saw it.
“I always thought they were the closest things to film, really,” he said when asked what intrigued him about translating his ideas into a graphic novel. “You’re picking out shots, they’re so cinematic.”
Creative control
Illustrated by Ignacio Noé and published by Mad Cave Studios, Momo is described as “a wild, genre-bending road trip with cosmic stakes,” following two criminals on the lam” as they team up to “recover an ancient artifact for Jackie Gleason.”
The biggest attraction with the book, according to Cusack, is that he was able to create a story without having to compromise his vision.
“I thought, I want to tell a story, but I didn’t want to negotiate telling a story, really,” he said of the book that blends science fiction with political satire. “And when you ask somebody to put $20 or $30 million into a bank account [for a film], they want to have an opinion and they’re afraid and all that stuff.”
‘Done by two people’
Instead, he said the project remained entirely in the hands of its two creators.
“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. And so, it’s really a piece of work that was just done by two people [who] did a great job putting it out,” the star of Say Anything… said, adding that creating the book outside the traditional studio system is something that “doesn’t happen today.”
“There’s no bull, and there’s no committee,” he said. “There’s no computer up in Seattle that’s poll testing it.”
Although Momo is his first graphic novel, it isn’t his first time as an author. Cusack previously co-wrote the 2016 essay collection Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, and he joked that if Momo were ever adapted for the big screen, he’d happily star in it himself.
His sister made a similar choice
Cusack isn’t the only member of his family to rethink life in Hollywood.
Earlier in 2026, his older sister Joan Cusack made her first red carpet appearance since 2015 when she attended the London premiere of Toy Story 5, ending an 11-year break absence from the star-studded events.
“I’ve got to say, I did at a certain point say wait a second, I really want to make a priority of being in Chicago where I live and raising my kids,” the 63-year-old actor told E! News at the Pixar film premiere. “This is what I’ve been doing for 10 years.”
Joan, who voices Jessie in the Toy Story franchise, also said there was a simple reason she hadn’t been seen on many red carpets.
“Being on the carpet is just kind of one part of Hollywood. They don’t always have carpets for TV shows and all kinds of other things, so I just haven’t been in a movie this big in a long time,” said Joan, who had a recurring role from 2011 to 2015 in the TV series Shameless.
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