JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING—In his latest film, John Cusack plays a man whose marriage failed because he spent too much time dreaming about being a writer and not enough time with his family. Jackson Curtis of 2012 is the latest in a list of flawed Cusack characters that stretches back to 1980s roles like The Sure Thing’s sex-obsessed Walter “Gib” Gibson and Say Anything slacker Lloyd Dobler. In a Jackson Hole hotel room, Cusack says it’s unlikely that anyone would want to see him playing Joe Average.

“I think it is a combination of what people see me as and [what] the studios want to give me,” he says. “Also, there is not much drama in roles about well-adjusted people. I am definitely flawed, and I am sure that it comes through in my characters. I think that is just the way people are. It is the human condition. So if I express that, I have done okay. I think most people are damaged.”

The film, which opens November 13, follows through on ancient Mayan predictions that the world will end in December 2012. The story centres on a group of people as they prepare for the end. Cusack says that when he read the script sent by the film’s cowriter-director, Roland Emmerich, he could see that the individual characters became more interesting as their potential for survival became more problematic.

“Roland sent me a script, and it was a real page turner,” Cusack says. “By the end of the movie, it got very intense and emotional, and I thought it was a really good epic movie all around. As you read it, interesting things would happen. The story got bigger and bigger and the geography of the characters and the places where they felt safe got smaller and smaller. As a result, the movie got more and more intimate as it went on. I hadn’t seen that in most action movies because once the explosions start, the characters stop. But Roland reverse-engineered it. I thought it was a terrific script, and I was happy to do it.”

Although the Chicago-born Cusack has been involved in politics and was a big supporter of his hometown candidate Barack Obama, he says he was happy that the story of 2012 didn’t blame anyone for the problems that lead to the world’s ruin.

“I think it taps into the paranoia about how out of control things are in the world,” he says. “Everyone knows what the problems are with global warming, but this doesn’t get into the politics of it. It asks, ”˜What are your values?’ It cuts through the BS. I think that is the function of disaster films and that people like them because they give expression to people’s fears and give them unity. At the end of the movie, everyone is on the same playing field. That is a nice populist myth that we all hope could happen some day, but I felt it was able to get there without the politics.”