Being John Cusack

I meet John Cusack to discuss his new film, Serendipity, a slight but charming romantic comedy co-starring Kate Beckinsale; a movie that toys with clich? and dips its toes in schmaltz, but finally transcends both by virtue of those two amiable central performances.

But actually - blatantly - Cusack doesn't want to talk about Serendipity at all. He lolls on a sofa glugging from a bottle of mineral water, and deals with each question curtly, kind of tired and washed out. This isn't evasion, I think, nor wilful rudeness - though it might be boredom, and it could even be an acknowledgement of the film's essentially sweet emptiness.

Serendipity is a New York fairy tale, he says, a piece of escapism, a love story; what else do you wanna know? It's a subversion of ancient Greek dramatic theory, too - the one that says railing against the Fates can only end in tragedy - but then, truly, it's not a film that bears an enormous amount of serious scrutiny, unusually for a Cusack vehicle. Indeed, the depth and breadth of Cusack's acting career compared to those of the vast majority of his peers is exactly what defines him.

Anyway, after five minutes of Serendipity, we stop talking about the movie and start rambling through a whole set of different subjects, and Cusack sits up for a while and appears to enjoy himself and forgets, briefly, about rehydration after a flight into London from a film set in Prague. This is his well-documented MO - "let's just have a conversation and both ask questions" - and it's a good one because not only does it seem superficially flattering, it also allows him to body-swerve the private stuff he doesn't want to answer.

What's odd about Cusack, the 35-year-old man, is that people who like his work tend to think that they know him, as you might know the entirely approachable friend of a friend - when in fact, of the myriad actors we watch week in, week out, at the multiplex or the art house, we probably know Cusack least well of all. This might be a function of his particular brand of realism, the complexity of emotion and motivation with which he endows his well-chosen characters.

An obvious truism: we relate to the characters played by John Cusack - even Martin Blank, the ethically conflicted hit man in Grosse Pointe Blank; even, my God, Roy Dillon in the Stephen Frears classic The Grifters - more than we relate to the characters played by, say, Bruce Willis. What's certain, though, is that his private life remains more or less obscure, less good copy than the private lives of similarly successful American actors.

Even the numerous websites dedicated to him, compiled one imagines, by the cyberspace equivalents of Rob Gordon's sidekicks in High Fidelity, are respectfully free of gossip (save, OK, the odd picture of Neve Campbell, a former squeeze), tending instead to focus minutely on the work.

What we do know is that he's politically aware, part of the set that includes Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon and, frankly, the most interesting members of the Hollywood elite.

Cusack is of Irish descent, born in Illinois, raised in Chicago (sportswise, he says he supports "TheBullsTheBearsTheSox") the fourth of five children, all of whom work in the performing arts (Joan, not just in his opinion, is his equal as an actor). His dad Richard, a documentary maker, and his mum Nancy, a maths teacher, were both Left-of-centre, pacifist, involved. So the conversation inevitably turns to the US administration's prosecution of war in Afghanistan, a heavy subject but "much more interesting", he says (accurately) than the movie Serendipity.

His views are considered and intelligent, a vocalisation of the liberal American - and broad European - dilemma; often heard here, not nearly so often in the US. "It's an incredibly complicated situation," he says, softly. "You need clearly to go get these people (Bin Laden and his cronies) and eliminate them. It's like, if you had a mad dog running in the streets trying to attack children, you'd go put it down. At the same time, you have to look at why there's such a fundamental hatred of the West - and to say that they don't like our culture, or our freedom, just isn't good enough - and what role US foreign policy plays in that."