John Cusack has clarified persistent rumours that he had once been offered the role of John “Bender” in John Hughes’ iconic film The Breakfast Club.
“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,” the Say Anything star told Josh Horowitz on his Happy Sad Confused podcast on Monday about the 1985 teen classic.
“I thought it was a cool script, but it didn’t go that way.”
Judd Nelson ended up playing Bender alongside Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, and Emilio Estevez.
Cusack was in one of Hughes’ “Brat Pack” movies, however, playing Bryce in 1984’s Sixteen Candles, which also starred Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall.
When asked about being a “teen idol” at the time, Cusack said he was lucky because his parents kept him grounded, and he was never really taken with himself.
“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.
The 60-year-old said that his actor father, Dick Cusack, always told him “’to be a celebrity is death for an artist’. He was about ‘what’s the script, what’s the part, what’s this thing saying, right?’”
He said that rubbed off on him, adding that he “didn’t take any of that (celebrity) stuff seriously as a teen”.
Sixteen Candles was one of Cusack’s earliest roles, but he went on to classics like Stand By Me, Con Air, Grosse Pointe Blank, The Thin Red Line, Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity, and 2012.
Cusack lamented that lately however, while many films globally are “awesome,” he feels American cinema has gone “flat”.
He said when he acted in Say Anything in 1989, the producer had worked on “seminal, amazing films” like Paper Moon and The Last Picture Show, so “her mindset wasn’t ‘How are we going to make the most money and who am I going to connect with here.’ It was different values.”
This article originally appeared in Fox News and was reproduced with permission.