A Real Sweetheart

“He’s ready for you,” says John Cusack’s publicist, opening the door to a nondescript suite at the Regency Hotel. The place could pass for a physician’s waiting room, suggests the visitor.

“Does that make you the patient or does it make me the patient?” responds Cusack, clad in the hip young actor’s uniform of jeans, sneakers and black T-shirt.

“Maybe we’re both sick,” he says, then cocks his fashionably mussed bed-head, thinks for a minute, and comes up with a diagnosis. “I need attention, I really need a doctor’s attention.”

You do?

“Yes, I think I do.”

What’s wrong with you? Did you have an unhappy childhood?

“No, not really.... You’re pretending to be a Freudian. I think Jungian is so much more interesting, don’t you?”

Jungian it is: So are you in touch with your anima?

“I talk to my shadow now and again. Ask for change for a 20, things like that.” Cusack shakes a cigarette from a pack and sticks it behind his ear. “Want one?” he asks.

No, thanks.

“Vodka?”

You know, cigarettes are bad for you.

“I have no comment since American Spirit cigarettes is one of my sponsors,” he kids. “I signed a contract and I can’t speak negatively about the tobacco industry. My clothes are all made out of a hemp-tobacco mix.”

Well, they fit very nicely, considering.

Let’s face it. The playful actor, writer and stage director has had it up to his five o’clock shadow with interviews. Besides, he’s having way too much fun goofing around. Unlike most celebrities with a new movie to pump, he doesn’t steer the conversation to his own: “America’s Sweethearts,” a blithe romantic comedy also starring Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones. (In fact, he’d seemingly rather talk about anything else.)

Cusack and Zeta-Jones, as the title characters, are actors who have split up after years of marriage. Before the breakup, they made one last movie together and, despite their misgivings, agree to attend a press junket. Over the course of the story, Cusack realizes he’s fallen for Roberts, the formerly fat sister of the vain Zeta-Jones.

Cusack, 35, is taking the junketeering in stride. He figures it’s part of the job, and he’s got no problem with that, except for doing talk shows.

“They want you to be a stand-up comic and tell stories, only pretend like you’re not. And you’re supposed to be yourself, so you have to perform yourself. That’s so foreign to me,” he says.

Yes, but you aren’t the real you in your movies.

“I am a little, don’t you think?

“I live in the paradox,” he explains. “Brooding but innocent, carnivore but vegetarian.”

You’ve also been called a postmodern icon.

“Icon is way too heavy. Maybe if I’m still making films in 20 years. I think I prefer joie de vivre ... infectious.” He pauses, laughs. “That was the dumbest thing I ever said. I’m going to get hammered here, aren’t I?”

Cusack was 7 when he followed his older sister Joan into Chicago Piven Theatre Workshop and 13 when he became a pitch-kid for McDonald’s. Since then, Joan and John have shared the screen nine times, beginning with his debut in the preppy 1983 sex farce “Class.”

Does he expect her to audition for his movies?

“Yes, I do. I make her provide new head shots and an updated resume. And I make her do a song and dance to something bouncy like ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me.’

“I’m not there when it happens,” he adds. “What I do is pay somebody to tape it, and then I pay another person to watch the tape and tell me how she did so that I’m four steps removed from auditioning my own sister.”

Sounds complicated.

“No, I don’t audition my sister. It’s more like: ‘She’s so busy. Can we get her?”’

Cusack is about to launch into another flight of fantasy when a waiter arrives with his lunch--a turkey burger and fries--and leaves the food to cool on the cart.

Hey, you’re a star. Don’t they feed you on silver platters?

“Actually, I’m force-fed like a goose. I never learned how to eat on my own,” says Cusack, who gets his own grub, plops the plate on the coffee table and bites into his burger, following it with a French fry dipped in mustard.

“Want anything?” He leaps up and crosses the room to a table, pulls a decorator lemon from the centerpiece. “How about this?”

No, thanks, but how about a bar of star-suite soap? This reporter collects them.

“I’ll get you some star soap. I’m proud to add to your collection,” he says gallantly, then exits and returns with a shrink-wrapped cake. “It says, ‘Clean.’ You can tie that into my work. ‘Like the soap I gave you, my acting is clean. It’s cleansing the population.’ ... I’m going to get hammered.”

This interview isn’t really working out.

“You bear some responsibility, don’t you think?” he says.

You could say something of substance.

“Hmm. What can I say that’s worthy of the Washington Post?”

How about slamming a Republican?

“I’ve done that already. I have an honest difference of opinion with them. I think they’re dishonest,” says Cusack. “‘There’s no conclusive science on the Kyoto accord.’ That means they paid some scientist to say there’s no global warming,” he says. “But there is no science that says the missile defense shield can work. We can spend billions on that, but scrimp on education and the environment.”

How about the tax cut?

“My parents did get that $300. They’re going to pay off the mortgage, and all the grandchildren will be well looked after.”

Do you have kids?

He shakes his head.

None out of wedlock whom you don’t claim?

“Yes, my life is rife with scandal. Shocking.”

Cusack, whose early teen-oriented movies--”Say Anything,” “The Sure Thing” and “Sixteen Candles”--still attract young female videophiles, made his breakthrough in 1990’s “The Grifters.” Cusack found himself in familiar territory, torn between two stunning women--in this case, his mother (played by Anjelica Huston) and his lover (Annette Bening). In “Being John Malkovich,” Cusack wrestled with the urge to cheat on his ditzy wife (Cameron Diaz) with a glamorous co-worker (Catherine Keener). Though the lovable loser usually ends up with the right woman, this time the women ended up with each other.

It’s back to business as usual in “America’s Sweethearts.” Will it be Zeta-Jones’ diva? Or Roberts, her toadying sister, now 60 pounds lighter and wearing contacts?

He was a friend to plump Julia in flashbacks, but he didn’t see her as a potential soul mate until she lost her fat suit and emerged as a marriageable size 2. Basically it’s the “Ugly Duckling” story and poor ammunition for an actor who’s just said, “I won’t make movies that tell lies about love.

“What matters is that he was kind to her all along.... Personally I like women who are a little plump rather than too skinny. I don’t like heroin chic. I like curves,” says Cusack, who has been linked with non-anorexic actresses Minnie Driver and Neve Campbell.

He’s also said he’d never make a movie about killing somebody.

“No, I said I wouldn’t make a jingoistic movie. I won’t make a ‘be all you can be’ commercial disguised as a movie.”

He did carry a gun as a soldier in 1998’s “The Thin Red Line,” Terrence Malick’s account of the battle for Guadalcanal. “We’re up there in period clothing, climbing the hills. Just doing takes, we were hot and exhausted. But we had elbow and knee pads and plenty of cold Evian water. When you think about what the real men did, it’s beyond comprehension. You just really tried to use your imagination to honor them.”

In “America’s Sweethearts,” Cusack’s character regales the media with outlandish tales. He tells one TV reporter that he’s involved in a three-way with his estranged wife and her hunky Latin lover.

If only he’d said something like that today.

“Well, I told you I was force-fed like a goose. That’s pretty good, right?”

His publicist slips in, gives the sign.

“Time to bail out of the bomb bay doors.”

His visitor is about to walk out when Cusack notices she’s left something behind.

“Hey, don’t forget your lemon,” he says. “It’ll remind you of my early career.”