There are doctors who are incompetent. There are malevolent doctors. And then there are billionaire industrial pharmaceutical pioneers like Dr. Kevin Christie in Amazon’s “Utopia” series.
Dr. Christie, played by John Cusack with a velvety creep of a whisper, is publicly crusading to deliver a life-saving vaccine during a global pandemic, but behind the scenes is enmeshed in sinister scenarios.
Cusack, 54, cautions against judging Christie too early. “He’s a very complicated dude. You may think you’ve got the straight (story) but more is to be revealed! By the end of Episode 8 you’re going to find yourself down a different rabbit hole — or a different Cheshire cat – about what we think the good guys and the bad guys are.
“Christie is like this biotech TED-talk Willy Wonka. Or something. Whatever his world is, it’s a very insane world. The more you get into it the stranger it gets.”
“Utopia” is adapted by Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”) from the 2013 British original. Cusack signed on immediately. “It was a real easy choice for me. I got the scripts and, a page-turner, read them all in one sitting. It just rocked!
“I knew Gillian was not just going to do a remake but add another whole world to it. And the real-life parallels to Kevin Christie are all over the place — the benevolent millionaires, the tech guy who says, ‘Don’t be evil. Be good.’
“Yes, they’re doing amazing things but they also have multiple agendas going on.”
“Utopia” also speaks to a persuasive paranoia. “There is an element of ‘Utopia’ that that gets into. Because it is a conspiracy theory in that tradition of big governments and transnational corporations (secretly running the world). But it’s also a cult of behavior inside those places. So cult is the right word.”
Cusack, acting since his teens, was long the unconventional hero of rom-coms like “Say Anything” (’89), “Grosse Pointe Blank” (’97) and “High Fidelity” (2000). Scary Dr. Christie is definitely a departure.
“I was never interested in that kind of acting where you’re protecting a ‘brand,’ you know? I’m happy to play any role in drama that you can play,” he said.
“When you’re younger, you play young lovers or you play the hero’s journey where he goes off to save the day. But at some point you get to play the dragon under the bridge the heroes meet — and that’s fun.
“It’s nice to get past your vanity and just play all sorts of different roles. So if I play a bad guy and somebody thought it was scary, I’d say I’m trying to do a good job.”
