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John Cusack’s defiant gesture of love in 1989’s Say Anything didn’t come as easily as one might think.
More than 35 years after Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler became a pop culture icon by holding up a boom box outside the window of Ion Skye’s Diane Court as Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” blared from the speakers, the 59-year-old actor admits he “didn’t know what to do” at first.
“I didn’t know how to play it, because I thought this character was going to be sitting outside whining and saying, ‘Please come back,'” Cusack explained during a screening of the film on Nov. 30 at the King’s Theater in New York City. “Men have pride, right?”
But soon, the 1408 star “got the part.”
“He knew that maybe something fishy was going on with her father, or that someone was in her head,” he continued about his role in the Cameron Crowe-directed film. “So I thought, I don’t know how to do that. And at the end of the movie, I thought, ‘Oh, what if he’s really bad? And he becomes more rebellious.'” And it worked. ”
Cusack also revealed that he only agreed to play the iconic character if Crowe, 68, agreed to make some changes to the script. Because after reading this book for the first time, I realized that a lot of movies portray young people through the lens of “45-50 year old professional writers who are in the mouths of all these people.”
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What did he want to change about Lloyd’s character? Cusack explained, “This character was more optimistic, but without the dark side.” As such, he wanted to make clear that Lloyd “chose to be optimistic,” noting that it makes him “kind of heroic.”
“It’s like a[John]Lennon and[Paul]McCartney song,” he continued. “Paul McCartney wrote, ‘You have to admit that things are getting better. They’re always getting better.’ And John Lennon says, ‘It can’t get any worse.’ That was the nature of that character. ”
