Cusack on 1408, his upcoming projects and, of course, Paris Hilton.

John Cusack's acting career has been steadily chugging along for over twenty years. He’s not the biggest star on planet, but he’s well-liked by fans and colleagues alike. While he may not be the kind of actor that can open a summer blockbuster, he’s no box office slouch either. He works very steadily, with a half dozen projects slated for release over the next year alone.

Although he may no longer qualify as a heartthrob, girls have always thought Cusack was cute and, heck, I’ll even admit to heterosexual affinity for the guy. He’s just got that appeal. He seems like a likable guy. And in person, he’s not all that different from some of his most beloved characters like Lloyd Dobler, Martin Blank and Lane Meyer.

Cusack’s latest, 1408, is a thriller based on a Stephen King short of the same name from the short story collection, “Everything’s Eventual.” In our current times, where horror has become more about shock value and torture rather than goose bumps and jumps, 1408 is a return to the more classical horror. It’s more in the vein of The Shining or Poltergeist than Saw or Hostel.

In the story, Cusack portrays Mike Enslin, a dime store novelist writing books about supernatural locales around the world. His latest book is on hotels and it’s nearly finished. He’s got just one more stop scheduled at room 1408 of New York’s Dolphin Hotel, where an unprecedented number of people have expired over the past half decade. The hotel’s manager, Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), pleads with Enslin not to stay in the room, but the jaded writer insists. For Enslin, once a very good writer whose life has gone to pieces since the death of his daughter, he’s simply phoning in these books as a way of avoiding his past. He doesn’t believe in the books he writes, but they have become a way of escaping and getting by. But room 1408 feels it’s time for Mr. Enslin to take a look back at what his life has become.

Dressed in a dark suit as he often is in his movies, a dapper Cusack enters the press room with his trademark half-smirk.

1408 is rated PG-13, which means only one F-Bomb may be dropped during the entire 94 minutes. And although it’s Cusack who appears in nearly every frame and endures a plethora of insanity at the hands of the horrors beheld in room 1408, it’s his costar Sam Jackson who gets to release the “Evil F***ing Room” line.

“I was actually pissed off by that because it's PG-13,” says Cusack with utter seriousness. “And I was getting tortured in this room for 15 weeks, and you're being tortured and all you want to do is just swear. You want to go, ‘F***! S***!’ But you can't!”

Almost like a one-man stage show, Cusack spends the majority of his time in 1408 acting solo (except for some supernatural roomies). “[Director] Mikael [Hafstrom] and I, we sort of had a Stockholm syndrome where the room was keeping us captive, but as soon as we got out of the room and got to work with Mary [McCormick] and Sam [Jackson] and stuff…it was kind of strange. You went to the lobby and there were all these extras, and then you'd go out to Venice Beach and there were these surfers and things. We just thought, ‘We gotta get back in the room, get back to the room where it's safe and horrible.’”

“And it's me staring at the walls and I get tortured… That made more sense than dealing with people after a while.”

Besides being based on a Stephen King short, 1408 is already drawing comparisons to another creepy movie classic based on a King story, Stanley Kubrick’s genre masterpiece, The Shining. It was that film, in fact, that first introduced a young Cusack to the genre.

“My parents took us to Boston - Nantucket, right? [We were visiting] some cousins…about 1979 or ‘80, and The Shining had come out, and it was already sort of was a classic, it was in all the revival houses. I snuck in to the theatre around six o'clock because it was an ‘R’ movie, and I had to walk back to this cottage where we were staying. And when I got out it was night, and it was a pretty winding road with lamps and stuff. That was the scariest walk home I've ever taken after a movie. I saw The Shining when I was about 12 years old and that freaked me out. I saw Jack Nicholson around the corner in every bush…”

“That was my first entry into Stephen King. Then I saw Carrie as I got older, read “The Stand” in about one sitting for a whole night, I couldn't put it down so, I think he's very underrated as writer. Also his sense of character… He writes terrific characters.”

As Enslin spirals deeper into the dark world of 1408 and starts to unravel, Cusack was required to maintain “a lot of wattage,” as he puts it. “You’re trying to… keep the tension or keep the stakes raising… You had to keep putting out… I would really try and figure out the logic of the inside of the room, and once you figured it out, you actually do it with no one to cut away to. That was a challenge.”

“And then doing the end, it really kind of let it, going along with the dare, the room setting… You’re going to find what you’re bringing with you. You’re going to go through nine circles of hell, but each one of them is going to have a piece of your life and your past, and you’re going to have to confront your demons in it…”

Up Next for Cusack is Grace is Gone, which releases in October. It won the audience award at Sundance and Cusack’s performance has already drawn strong praise. Cusack portrays Stanley Phillips, a man who heads on a road trip with his two daughters after his wife dies in the Iraq conflict. “[It’s] about this country and people going through shattering grief, so it seemed appropriate to make a movie about the times you live in once and a while… I think that's a perfectly reasonable response to the war we're in here…”

Also slated for release later in the year is Brand Hauser, a sort of tongue-in-cheek take on the Iraq conflict in which Cusack portrays the hit man of the title (no relation to his Grosse Pointe Blank character) contracted to kill a Middle East Oil Minister. Hauser covers a producer of a trade show that features the wedding of a big pop star played by Hilary Duff.

“That one's actually funny. We're trying to live up to the Paddy Chayefsky, Strangelove of it all.”

Cusack actually played a part in Duff’s casting. “There's a role with a very slutty pop, Eurasian pop star and so the idea of Hilary, who's so classy and kind of wholesome doing that was pretty funny. There's a real kind of a lascivious young pop star who wants to be like one of these girls that I don't need to mention…”

On that note, the seemingly unavoidable topic of Paris Hilton’s prison scenario was brought to the table. With a smile, Cusack responded, “Yeah, I’ll talk about it. I think all heiresses should be put in prison on general principle. I’m talking about old money. I’m Irish-American, so I’m anti-royalist. I insistently don’t trust the monarchy, so any heiress should have to do prison time – mandatory prison time.

And with that, he was out.