CusickGallery.net: Henry Ian Cusick

ScreenRant: Henry Ian Cusick interview

BY ZAK WOJNAR– ON MAR 14, 2019

The provocative new science fiction horror tale, Chimera, tells the story of a mad scientist who crosses ethical boundaries and enters into a world where science becomes unholy black magic. Henry Ian Cusick (The Passage, The 100, Inhumans) stars as Quint, a scientist who studies the real-life Turritopsis jellyfish in an effort to save his children from their terminal condition.

Directed by first-time filmmaker Maurice Haeems, Chimera resembles a mix of classic “mad scientist” science fiction, horrific body horror tales of the 1980s and beyond, and the visually stunning color-coded sterility of modern day auteurs like Shane Carruth and Nicolas Winding Refn.

While promoting the release of Chimera, Henry Ian Cusick spoke to us about the fascinating pedigree of director Maurice Haeems, starring in a science fiction film with a small budget but big ideas, and what it’s like to shoot a movie and being forced to wait, potentially for years, before it eventually gets released to the public. He also shares some insight into his status as a Latino actor who generally doesn’t get cast in roles which allow him to speak Spanish on screen.

Screen Rant: Let’s talk about Chimera. This is a leading role in a movie from a first time director, Maurice Haeems. Tell me a little bit about his approach, compared to other science fiction that you’ve been involved in, and you’ve been involved in some very high profile sci-fi.

Henry Ian Cusick: The film came to me from my manager. I read it, and it was a really huge script, difficult to read. I met Maurice on Skype. He is from Mumbai, and he’s roughly my age, and he was incredibly intelligent. When he started talking about the science behind it, and how he got into studying biology because he had a friend or relative who was dying of a disease and he was experimenting with the Turritopsis jellyfish… These things actually do exist. They grow, they regress, and they grow again. They’re actually immortal, they can live forever. I thought, this guy actually knows what he’s talking about, and I just really liked him. So, you always take a chance with this stuff, you never know how it’s going to end up. So I took a chance. And he surrounded himself with a really good crew who shot it and did a great job. He managed to get a facility in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where we shot every single scene. In that one location. It’s great for a low-budget film to shoot in one location. You don’t have to go anywhere. Everything was shot there. That was genius. And it was a great location. It was really a character in the film. And he got Kathleen Quinlan and Erika Ervin, and he got Jenna Harrison to star in it. Yeah, his learning curve was huge, but he was getting things very quickly, he’s so intelligent. And the whole editing of it was… When I finally saw the film, it was not the film that I read. It was changed a lot in the editing process. The way he edited it, adding the voices and the music and the lights, he really did a tremendous job.

Screen Rant: I imagine these types of movies are low-budget affairs, but Chimera has such a strong visual style and verisimilitude; it feels so plausible, even when it gets pretty psychedelic.

Henry Ian Cusick: The set was great. It was rough and ready. It’s all dark and dingy and run down… You never see the high-tech lab with all those things, you never really get to see what country you’re in. My character has an American accent, but my wife’s accent, Jenna is English. You believe it, but you don’t know exactly where you are in the world.

Screen Rant: How hard is it to learn dialogue and improvise lines while you’re playing a high-level scientist?

Henry Ian Cusick: With the scientific jargon, Maurice was on top of that. He would give us the correct pronunciation, the correct terminology. We trusted him. With the rest of it, we followed the script, but we were given the freedom to make everything our own, and we changed things up in the shooting. It’s normal in indie filmmaking, where you make the scene work for the location, or you make the scene work for the actors, or you make the scene work for whatever is happening in the moment. You always have to deal with that. I’ve been doing this for a while now, so I’m always open and willing to go, “Let’s change this,” or “Can we try this?” Maurice was such a great leader that he would listen to, not just me, but David Kruta, who was our great DP… It was ultimately his decision, but he would take advice from a lot of people and then make a decision. I really liked the way he ran it. He was always open to suggestions, and yet very strong and calm at the helm. I learned a lot from him, just watching how he dealt with situations.

Screen Rant: He seems like a real pro even though Chimera is his first movie!

Henry Ian Cusick: This is not his first career. He ran a company before moving into the film world. He ran a very successful software company. He knows what he’s doing. I completely trusted him as a director.

Screen Rant: I wouldn’t expect you to speak for him, but do you have any insight as to why he chose to switch careers?

Henry Ian Cusick: I think he’s always been a huge film fan. We talked about movies and sci-fi a lot. Upstream Color was a movie we talked about a lot. That was a low-budget film, Shane Carruth… He shot low-budget, on handheld, it’s terrific. I really love that movie, and we talked about it a lot, how the audience is always slightly behind what’s going on. We’re similar in that respect, the audience is slightly behind the movie, but they know they’re getting answers if they hang in there and pay attention. I think he thought, I love film and I want to make one. I think that’s why we all get into it. We all love film and want to be involved. He decided to write, produce, direct, and edit his own.

Screen Rant: Between Chimera and The Passage, you are the smartest person on the screen. You are an expert in all the sciences, or at least you play it on TV. What was the timeline like on these projects?

Henry Ian Cusick: We started Chimera a long time ago. We started shooting in 2015. We were supposed to start in February, but the weather was so bad we ended up pushing to March or April of 2015. It was a bad winter that year. This movie has been a long time coming. You know, after we shot, Maurice took a little break, and then he started editing. And the script is very different from the film. That happens a lot, but they made some pretty big changes. But I think they’ve done a great job. The Passage, that’s the polar opposite. We shot that in August, and the show aired in January. TV is just so fast. It’s a machine. It goes so quickly. Once you shoot it, someone edits it, you ADR it, and color it, and boom, it’s out. It’s a very different process.

Screen Rant: What’s it like when you shoot a movie like Chimera, and you’re finished with it, and you’re so excited for people to see it, but then it doesn’t come out for four years? Do you think about it all the time, or do you try to ignore it and move on to the next thing?

Henry Ian Cusick: That’s an interesting question. I’m grateful. I’m so pleased that Maurice got it out. I think it’s a movie that deserves to be seen. I’ve shot other movies that are equally as good. Just Let Go, a movie I shot in Utah, no one’s seen it. It’s out there somewhere, on a very small platform, but it’s hard to get it out there. I kind of thought Chimera might never get released properly, it might just pop up at a few film festivals and be dead and buried, but then Vertical Entertainment came in and they’re really pushing it, and I think it’s a really good film. I think fans of smart, intelligent sci-fi will really enjoy it. I’m so delighted that Maurice got it out there, because he did a great job and it really deserves an audience. Fingers crossed that it does well.

Screen Rant: Finally, I want to ask you something a little more personal. You are a Latino actor, but you’re very light skinned and don’t have a hispanic surname, much like myself, actually. My dad is Polish/Irish, so my last name is Wojnar.

Henry Ian Cusick: Right, you have the same thing I have. My last name is Cusick, which is Irish/Scottish. My mother’s name is Esperanza Chávez. My mother’s Peruvian. Where’s your mother from?

Screen Rant: She’s Honduran. Her name is Carlota Alvarado, now Wojnar.

Henry Ian Cusick: I was born in Peru, my mother’s Peruvian. We both speak Spanish. Spanish was my first language. But people who don’t know that I am Latino are surprised because my name is Henry Ian Cusick. You know. My mom just loved the name Ian, and my dad’s name was Henry. I could have been named Enrique Chávez, and that would have been very different for me. Also, when I speak Spanish, I speak in a rather Scottish accent, which is a bit weird, as well.

Screen Rant: Are people surprised when they learn about your background?

Henry Ian Cusick: When Latinos look at me, they’re surprised. They always say, “You don’t look it!” But then when they see me standing next to me mom, or they hear me speaking, they go, “Oooooh.” Once they get their head around it, after a while, they can see it. Usually, my nose gives it away. It’s a rather sort of hook nose. Once they know that I am and they look at me again, they go, “Aye, si, podo ver, podo ver.” In my family, I’m probably the whitest.

Screen Rant: Do you feel like it’s affected you as an actor?

Henry Ian Cusick: I have never been given a Hispanic role. Ever. No, that’s a lie, I played a hispanic terrorist in one episode of Hawaii Five-0. But that was it.

Screen Rant: Would you like to play more Hispanic roles?

Henry Ian Cusick: I would love to. I would love to be able to speak Spanish on film. That would be great. That’s on my bucket list, for sure. I kind of secretly want to be in a telenovela. I think that would be kind of fun!

Chimera hits theaters and VOD on March 15.

Ian loves animals dearly, so can’t imagine what it was like for him to film these scenes…..

‘Chimera Strain’ Clip Transplants Organs Out of a Pig [Exclusive]

By Michael Dunaway | March 11, 2019 | 4:30pm

Henry Ian Cusick Interview

[Editor’s note: The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.]

Paste: Growing up in Glasgow, tell me about that. What’d your folks do?

Henry Ian Cusick: So, my father, my mother is Peruvian, and she… her name is Esperanza Chavez and his name is Henry Joseph Cusick and he’s Irish Catholic. He at the age of 16, I believe, left home and joined the Merchant Navy, and then at the age of 18 he was signed up for the Second World War. He was always in the ships and traveled and, actually I did a bit of Ancestry.com on him. I found out what he used to do on the ships. He ended up working as an engineer on the ships and traveling the world and ended up in Peru at the age of 40-something and married my mum. They had my two sisters and me in Peru and then we moved to Spain, where my little brother was born. Then Scotland for a bit and then we spent, I spent most of my childhood in Trinidad, in the West Indies—

Paste: Oh, wow.

Cusick:And then I moved to Scotland when I was 14, 15.

Paste: That’s quite cosmopolitan.

Cusick: Yeah, you know, I’m very lucky that I had the opportunity to travel and see different cultures and different places. I think it helped me a lot as an actor and just as a person to realize that we’re all essentially the same. I think it would be great for more kids to travel and just experience different cultures.

Paste: Probably gave you a lot of friendships and acquaintanceships to draw on as you’re building a character, to think of the way that different people acted—not “acted” as in on stage, but acted as in acted in life, you know?

Cusick: Yeah! Essentially we all want the same things.

Paste: Tell me about, training—acting school? What did you do?

Cusick: I went to, there was a school called The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Scotland. It’s now called The Conservatoire. It got changed.

Paste: Because the name wasn’t douchey enough before?

Cusick: [Laughs] Because the name wasn’t douchey enough, obviously. But I didn’t finish my training there. I was pretty selective about my classes, so they asked me to leave. And that was actually a really good thing for me. It made me realize what I really wanted to do. It was a BA in Dramatic Studies, which encapsulated many things about the theatre, and it made me realize that I just wanted to act—that’s all I really wanted to do. I started doing some amateur dramatics, and I got my first acting job at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre as an understudy for the polar bear. So, we basically cleaned the stage, made the props, and then halfway through the show we’d come on. I was in a polar bear outfit, running around chasing the kids, screaming, “It’s snowing, it’s snowing, at last it’s really snowing!” So, that was a lot of fun, and that was my first professional acting job.

Paste: I love it. And at that stage, what did you consider your wheelhouse? Were you a classical guy? Were you a modern guy?

Cusick: There was a film theatre in Glasgow called The Glasgow Film Theatre and there were always some great indie art films there. On a Friday afternoon, you could go in there and show your unemployment card and you could watch movies for 50 pence. That, for me, when I came out of those shows, I was still in them, you know? That was my dream to be in something like that. The best theatre in Scotland at the time, or certainly in Glasgow, was the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. When I got a leading role there, I thought that was the pinnacle of my career, and then, of course, you move the goalposts and you think, “Well, what now?” and then I moved to London and then across to America and here I am now.

Paste: The lateral move to London and then the step down to America. [Laughs.] When was it that film and TV stuff started to happen for you?

Cusick: Quite late, because I was doing so much theatre that I couldn’t get out to do film and TV. It was only when I had three kids, living in the south of England, [that] I realized if I carried on doing theatre I’m just never gonna have any money. My wife was running a theatre company in London at the time called Polka, and I just said, “I have to stop doing theatre to make money.” It got me back into TV and film, which is what I really wanted to do. It was always there. So, that must have been about 2000, Lisa [sic:Esau] was born in 2000, and I thought no more theatre. I’ll hold out for those little—you know, I could get a day on a TV show and that was £1,000, which was a lot of money to me then. So that’s when I tried to pursue film and TV.

Paste: Lost must have been pretty soon after that, right? I don’t have my years completely straight.

Cusick: I think it was 2004? But I got on the show in 2005, 2006. That’s when I joined.

Paste: So, that’s not a long slog between “now I’m gonna get started in TV and film” to “I’m one of the most important characters on this revolutionary, biggest-thing-in-the-world show,” right? It probably felt long (laughs].

Cusick: It felt long, and also when I joined the show I didn’t know what it was and I was only on for a three-episode arc anyway and I thought, “I’m gonna do three episodes and I’ll head back home.” And then, when they didn’t kill me off, I thought, “That’s a good sign.”

Paste: You know, going back to theatre for just a second, I can see you as a theatre actor. If I was not sitting in front of you and someone said, “He was a big time theatre actor for years.” I mean, as I think about you and things I’ve seen you in on television and film, your face is so expressive. Your face has such an intensity. That character in Lost has such an intensity. I think about those people as being naturals for film and television, because you can do close-ups, you know? But, just sitting here talking to you, you have this whole body presence, a very strong presence and I can imagine walking on to a stage you would establish yourself very quickly on the stage.

Cusick: That’s very kind of you to say that, having never seen me on stage. [Laughs.] I had some good times on the stage and I’ve, you know, I’ve been in some big hits and some big turkeys. There was nothing that was better than coming off the stage after a great performance. I loved that sensation. But still… your half hour call, I could have been doing a show for three months and every time they called the half I was like, “Oh, God, how many’s out there? Oh God. Ah, fuck. OK, here we go.” [Laughs.] You know, it was always like, I wanted to do my best and give it my all, but it was exhausting and it’s hard work, every night. Doing six nights a week, plus your matinees, that’s—I don’t know if I have the energy, and prior to that I’d been traveling do the set up for the next town. It’s all fun. The theatre was a really fun life. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Paste: Sure. It’s like joining the circus, right?

Cusick: It really is, when you’re working in it and you’re all in it together. You develop some great close friendships. I never see them now. [Laughs.] But at the time, they’re your best friends. You’re in the trenches and it’s so much fun.

Paste: Some friendships have their time and place, you know. Doesn’t detract from what they are.

Cusick: When you meet up with them again, you pick up where you left off, that’s always cool.

Paste: I mean, the same thing happens on film sets, right? You’re intensely with them for a couple of months and then—

Cusick: Yes, yes, that’s true.

Paste: Were you the kind of stage actor that you’re very much aware and responding to the crowd so that they were part of everything being different each night, or did you kinda go into your own space and you were all about this part of the stage and not the whole house?

Cusick: I was very much the latter. I was very much into what I was doing and really played the fourth wall. There were some actors, you could actually see them: waiting for the laugh, got the laugh, move on. I was always pretty safe, didn’t play the crowd very much. I’d rather play the scene with another actor and go, “That was great! What was different? How do we get that tomorrow?”

Paste: I know that can an adjustment for stage actors. Or even stand-ups—the same thing. Stand-ups especially, because I know more of them that go into film, they’re acting in a comedy film and they think they’re bombing because nobody’s laughing. Even though they know nobody can laugh, because it’s a movie set.

Cusick: Yeah.

Paste: That rhythm of joke, laugh, joke, laugh is what they’re used to and they can’t shake the feeling that they’re not being funny, and they have to be handheld a lot. A couple of stage actors have told me the same thing. It’s so hard without an audience there.

Cusick: Yeah, you know when I did get a laugh, I would talk over my laugh. I was given the note many times, “No, wait for the laugh, wait for the laugh.” And I would just be like, no I’m in it, let them catch up to me.

Paste: My character doesn’t know there’s a laugh going on! [Laughs]

Cusick: You should wait for them to die down, so they can hear what you’re saying.

Paste: Tell me about The Passage.

Cusick: It’s based on a trilogy written by Justin Cronin. I play Dr. Jonas Lear. My character goes to Bolivia to look for the cure for his wife—she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s— with his best friend, Dr. Tim Fanning [played by Jamie McShane]. And Dr. Fanning, who’s a bit of an egomaniac doctor, we need to get some funding and we enlist the help of the military. And, of course, when you enlist the help of the military, everything’s going to go downhill, because they’re going to weaponize everything—which they do when we get the virus. Fanning is attacked by this 50-year-old man, and that’s how we get the virus back to the U.S. We start doing experiments on him in a project called “Project Noah.” This virus has the ability to cure all diseases, but should it get out to the public—because we haven’t perfected it—they will all turn in to “virals”—they’re basically vampires. That’s the premise of the show, and there’s an epidemic approaching us and we need to inject it in to a young person because it’ll work faster. So we get an anonymous young girl, Amy Belafonte [Saniyya Sidney], and her mother’s dead, so she’s anonymous. We can just discard her. Unfortunately, she’s brought in to Project Noah by Brad Wolgast [Mark-Paul Gosselaar]. He’s recently lost his daughter and he takes a shine to her and he tries to defend and befriend her. That’s really the start of the show. From there on it just gets crazier and crazier. This—it’s an epic, huge, huge story, spans over 900 years—

Paste: Wow.

Cusick: It’s got vampires, it’s post-apocalyptic—

Paste: Is the tone broad and kind of campy, like True Blood or is it more intense, epic kinda feel to it, like Interview With A Vampire?

Cusick: Neither. At the moment we’re going in a sort of chronological order, although we do flashback, to learn more about how characters have got there. And we’ve got this mindscape thing where Dr. Fanning can communicate with people through their dreams. It’s good, exciting TV. It reminds me of Lost in that way, in the way that it was exciting and it has the flashbacks, but it’s just good storytelling. The performances, especially by our young lead, Saniyya, and Mark-Paul, really is the heart of the show. And then you have, I work closely with Jamie McShane, who’s from Bloodline and is terrific and we have lot of good stuff together. I would highly recommend it, and I’m not just saying that because I’m in it!

Paste: What is your favorite part about playing this character, different from other characters that you’ve played?

Cusick: The ambiguity of what he’s doing I find fascinating. So, he goes to Bolivia to find a cure for his wife, who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s. And the wife says, “Don’t, just stay here and be with me.” Now, most men would do that. But he says, “No, I will fix this.” And he goes to find a cure. What kind of man does that? Now, as a scientist, a well-known scientist, is he doing this to really save his wife? Is he doing this for ego, knowing his place in history? So, every time he’s saying something [like], “I’m doing this because I love you,” there’s also ego. And when the military is brought in, he doesn’t say “stop,” he says, “OK, let’s keep on.” It’s like he’s always being tempted by the devil, and the devil is saying, “Just one more thing and you’ll cure it. One more thing and you’ll find it.” And eventually it’s all going to hit the fan. And although he’s always saying he’s noble and good, so I find that fascinating and that’s kinda cool.

The season finale of The Passage airs tonight at 8 p.m. on FOX.

Editor’s corrections:

It was Ian’s son, Esau, not Lisa, who was born in 2000.

Fanning was attacked by a 500-year old man, not a 50-year old man.