Cult Actors #11: Gary Busey

€œWe€™d like to do this one for the boppers €“ for those of you who bop.€
By popular account Gary Busey is mad. The media is full of his odd antics, like clawing at Jennifer Garner on the Oscar€™s Red Carpet, terrorising interviewers with his expansive 6ft frame, snorting cocaine of his dog€™s arse and babbling incoherently about aliens and other dimensional beings. This demented Texan from Goose Creek seems to have a one way ticket to Belleview. On screen he isn€™t much different €“ wired, weird and bursting at the seams. He has more energy than a nuclear accelerator and is sometimes just as volatile. He was the ex-CIA grunt who could hold a lighter under his own arm without flinching in LETHAL WEAPON (1987). He was the Highway cop who wanted a kiss from Johnny Depp in FEAR & LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998) and the cross dressing navel officer who hated Seagal in UNDER SIEGE (1992).
€œI know how everyone€™s feeling,€ he yells in 1983s Joel Schumacher comedy DC CABS. €œYou€™re feeling wild and on the edge and self destructive and I feel like that everyday, every minute of my life.€
So what€™s Busey story? Is he a lunatic actor who can only play other maniacs onscreen? Or is he an intelligent performer who, like countless other movie stars out there, has allowed his onscreen persona to dictate his off screen image? If it gets kids in the cinema and keeps him in the public eye then what the hell does it matter if people think he€™s an A-1 psycho? Right? If proof was needed that the latter were true, then his breakthrough performance in THE BUDDY HOLLYSTORY (1978) is surely it. This isn€™t a crazy that we€™re talking about here; this is a goddamn actor.

Gary Busey is Buddy Holly, squeezing his massive bulk into the legendary bopper€™s geeky black glasses and thin bow tie. His central performance is sweet yet confident - a quiet man with a big heart and modest belief in his own abilities:
€œWe make a sound together,€ he says of his band The Crickets, €œand when it feels good we put it on tape.€
Buddy was a gentle soul €“ a man who avoided the excess and screwing around that usually follows the rock €˜n€™ roll lifestyle. Busey has channelled this and the film is full of touching scenes of him nervously playing at an all black gig or trying to talk to his wife on the phone while the Big Bopper hollers in the background. In scenes like this Gary Busey is nowhere in sight; it€™s just us and Buddy. But it€™s easy to imagine Busey feeling frustrated by the tranquillity of the role. He was probably one of those kids who could never sit still at school and his later addiction to cocaine must have made him a virtual Tasmanian Devil. But on stage Buddy was a different animal €“ a demon possessed by this unholy music. And Busey owns the stage; screeching into the microphone, gasping for breath, strutting and sidestepping, twisting and jumping, controlled by the beat and charged by the rhythm. Along with co-stars Charles Martin Smith and Don Stroud, he performed on camera live, and captured an energy rarely seen in a musical biopic. In BUDDY HOLLY he effortlessly displayed a talent for character acting, but his next two roles set the mould for the kind of wild man he was to become. In John Milius€™ BIG WEDNESDAY (1978) Busey is one of a trio of surfing heroes (along with Jan-Michael Vincent and William Katt) who command the beaches of Southern California in the 1960s. His friends call him Masochist because, as he states:
€œI like pain€I€™ve eaten light bulbs.€
His stand out scene comes when the boys are called to the Vietnam draft board and come up with various €˜gags€™ to avoid service €“ one pretends to be limp, another that he€™s gay - while Masochist, of course, fanes insanity. Busey has a field day: he dresses in rags, douses himself with gasoline, eats his induction paper and combs his hair with a fish. Eventually he€™s dragged away in a straight jacket. Watching this film today it€™s hard not to wonder if this is the same game Busey is playing with the press now. CARNY followed in 1980 and saw Busey cast as an off-the-wall circus clown who sits in a cage and screams abuse in a guttural Tom Waits-style drawl. A sign above him reads, €œDump Bozo in the water,€ and he jumps and bellows like a trapped primate.
€œYou guys are going to get jail for looking so ugly,€ he snarls at the marks.
Perhaps unwisely Busey had set his stall as movie nut-job, and narrow sighted Hollywood executives found it hard to see him as anything else. Maybe Busey was beginning to see himself this way too, and his dependence on drugs was beginning to make him difficult to work with. He was just as barmy in DC CABS alongside Mr T, and in 1985 he played Corey Haim€™s Uncle Red in the werewolf chiller SILVER BULLET. The movie is another so-so adaptation of the work of Stephen King, but weirdly, in those humble surroundings, Busey delivered one of the finest performances of his career.

Uncle Red is a drunk; a three times divorced loser who€™s an embarrassment to his sister and a joke to the rest of the town. We first meet him playing cards with his crippled nephew Marty, chugging Wild Turkey straight from the bottle and swearing a blue streak right next to the kid. But what Busey brings to this role is his own massive heart. He has a vulnerability, a man who€™s been beaten by life. There is perhaps a lot of the real man in this film €“ the drained addict who€™s really just a kid at heart €“he just wants to play. He adlibbed constantly (the line, €œHoly jumped up Jesus Palomino,€ when he€™s told about the wolf man is a particular high point) and brought a truth to an otherwise silly horror picture. Because of Busey we care about Uncle Red and when he€™s finally confronted by the beast, he manages to be at once a terrified little boy and a man willing to die for his family. Whatever he does as an actor there is honesty behind it. It is perhaps why he€™s survived. Off screen it was harder to care. Drugs and drink were taking control and his violent rages were often taken out on his suffering wife. She had once referred to him as, €œGary Abusey,€ a nickname that is more chilling than it is funny. In the mid-80s his career began to peter out, but a role as the villainous tough guy Mr Joshua in LETHAL WEAPON secured him a new career playing the kind of steroid pumped dead-eyed psychos that littered Hollywood action movies in the late 80s (see also Alexander Godunov in DIE HARD (1988) and Vernon Wells in 1985s gay romp COMMANDO). He was in a the aforementioned UNDER SIEGE, played a shadowy government agent in PREDATOR 2 (1990), hunted humans in SURVIVING THE GAME (1994) and took on Wesley Snipes in DROP ZONE (1994). Occasionally he got to be the hero in these mindless actioners, but only when the budget couldn€™t afford a bigger name. There was ACT OF PIRACY (1988) and the commie bashing BULLETPROOF (1988) where he played renegade cop Frank €œBullet Proof€ McBain. Busey clearly has a blast, using insults like, €œbutt-horn,€ and following every comment with a flash of that keyboard farm smile.
€œYou know me,€ he grins, €œI€™m a one man suicide squad.€
In the late 80s this line almost became prophetic when Busey crashed his motorcycle without a wearing a helmet. He cracked his skull and doctors feared permanent brain damage. When Busey came to, he hardly helped refute this claim by suggesting he had seen God and the almighty had told him to seek spiritual help. He became a born again Christian, and over time gradually kicked his drug addiction (this despite nearly dying of a cocaine overdose in 1995). His films since the early 90s have perhaps been overshadowed by his eccentric personal life. He has been in a number of average movies, but is usually the best thing in them. POINT BREAK (1991) was a homoerotic surfer movie that would have disappeared into pretension and self-importance were it not for Busey€™s presence as FBI agent Pappas. While Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze pose for the camera, Busey chews up the scenery as the grumpy veteran who gets all the best lines:
€œHarp, I wanna tell you something,€ he says to his boss. €œI was in this Bureau while you were still poppin zits on your funny face and jackin off to the lingerie section of the Sears catalogue!€
But the good movies got few and far between. He was understated in David Lynch€™s LOST HIGHWAY (1997), fun in BLACK SHEEP (1996) and a dog in DOCTOR DOLITTLE 3 (2006).

In the meantime he has become a star of YouTube, with his incoherent rants and bizarre behaviour delighting smarter-than-thou internet surfers. Romance, he tells us in one such clip, actually stands for:
€œRelying On Magnificence And Necessary Compatible Energy.€
He was the focus of an OSBOURNE€™S style TV show called I€™M WITH BUSEY where a young comedian followed Busey on the:
€œSocial adventures I have everyday,€ the actor explained. €œThis includes playing music, paintball fighting and dressing up as a woman.€
But there are hints that Busey is merely playing to the camera €“ showing off and acting stupid like a kid trying to get attention. On the BUDDY HOLLY STORY audio commentary he is lucid and at times genuinely funny and he has spoofed his image on shows like SCRUBS, THE SIMPSONS and ENTOURAGE. Busey is perhaps troubled and eccentric, but it appears that he€™s more in on the joke than most of the ironic media crowd would have us to believe. But then it€™s more fun to laugh at someone than with them, right? He has made himself, €œHollywood€™s favourite lunatic,€ through seemingly his own choice and it has kept him in our minds more than films like THE GINGERBREAD MAN (2005) and THE HAND JOB (2005). It€™s a smart move and personality I€™m glad he€™s still around. Hollywood sure would be a dull place without him.
Contributor

Tom Fallows hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.