John Cusack names the two greatest actors of all time: “I don’t know if there’s better in history”

Posted On November 24, 2025November 24, 2025

His career may not have lived up to initial expectations, and his star has plummeted so far that he’s basically become a low-rent version of Nicolas Cage at his worst, but that doesn’t disqualify John Cusack from commenting on the greatest actors in cinema history.

Anyone who grew up watching him in the 1980s would have been convinced that he was destined for nowhere other than the very top, with Cusack pulling his weight in Sixteen Candles, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, and Say Anything…, marking him out as one of his generation’s brightest young talents.

He’s been in plenty of great movies since then, ranging from Bullets Over Broadway and Being John Malkovich to the delightful Grosse Point Blank and his Golden Globe-nominated performance in High Fidelity, by way of The Grifters and The Thin Red Line, but he’s a far cry from where he used to be.

Cusack has never been the shy and retiring type, and that outspoken nature, coupled with his complete and utter lack of enthusiasm toward playing the Hollywood game, has turned him from a cult icon into a slumming action hero who can, more often than not, be found lending his name to a constant procession of straight-to-video thrillers.

As mentioned, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know a thing about acting, and when he found himself sharing a cast with two of the all-time greats, it wasn’t lost on him. It had been a long time in the making for old friends Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, who’d been close for decades without starring in a movie together until they faced off on opposing sides in 2003’s John Grisham adaptation, Runaway Jury.

“I don’t know if there’s better film actors in history than these two guys,” Cusack told The Oklahoman before the film’s release. “They’re right among the very elite, so they were very inspirational just to even want to try to become an actor as a young man. So, I’ve been very fortunate to work with some of the people I grew up on.”

Between them, Hackman and Hoffman have four Academy Awards from 12 nominations, five Baftas from 14 nods, eight Golden Globes from 21 nominations, and dozens more accolades, never mind that they’ve starred in some of the greatest pictures ever made, from The French Connection to The Graduate and everything in between.

Incredibly, despite having two heavyweights at his disposal, director Gary Fleder didn’t originally plan on having them share a single scene, defeating the entire point of having two firm friends check off the one thing that had eluded them throughout their entire careers. When they did, it was a moment that neither of them would forget.

Are Hackman and Hoffman the two greatest actors in cinema history, as Cusack suggested? That’s a matter of personal preference, but they’re right up there. It would have been the perfect swansong for the former, too, but he had one last hurrah in him before retirement, and it unfortunately happened to be Welcome to Mooseport.

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