Jim Belushi talks 'The Chronology of Water' and mentions Kristen with Variety

 

When Jim Belushi was playing Ken Kesey — a literary giant gone to seed — in “The Chronology of Water,” he’d hear Kristen Stewart calling out from behind the camera with one consistent note.

“Drunker!” she’d yell.

And Belushi, who is nothing short of a revelation in Stewart’s feature directing debut, would adjust his register, finding the sadness drowning in a sea of booze and revealing the struggling family man hiding behind the prankster persona.

Stewart, whom Belushi describes as having “the mind of a writer, the heart of an actress, and the soul of a director,” created space for him to improvise, to breathe, to live inside Kesey’s skin.

Thank *** you didn't do some of my lesser known stuff because I couldn't remember.

“I studied Ken Kesey for three months,” Belushi says. “But I don’t do imitations. I can’t. My brother John was brilliant at it. I just try to get the essence.”

That essence, it turns out, is grief.

Belushi is one of two surviving members of a family of seven. The death of his brother — celebrated comedian John Belushi — of a drug overdose at 33 left a crater that took decades to navigate. When Stewart’s script — a meditation on survival and connection after unthinkable loss — landed on his desk, Belushi found himself in familiar territory. The story’s central line, “Nobody is big enough to hold what happens to us,” became his North Star.

“I forgave all my ex-wives,” he says, “because what happened to that character and Ken and what happened to me is so deeply sad and troubling that you resent people for not understanding.”

Belushi plays Kesey with a devastating tenderness, channeling personal grief into a performance so raw it feels less like acting and more like exorcism. Stewart created space for him to improvise, to breathe, to live inside Kesey’s skin.

“For me, there was no acting required,” Belushi says. “I just never felt more present and so connected.”

There’s a central paradox to Belushi’s career: He’s worked with Michael Mann, David Lynch, Woody Allen and Oliver Stone — yet somehow remains perpetually underestimated, even dismissed. He’s the guy from “According to Jim.” John’s little brother. The jokester who lands the punchline but never gets the chance to break your heart.

Until now.

Belushi not only gives one of the richest performances of his career in “The Chronology of Water,” but also steals scenes as a kindhearted small-time manager in Craig Brewer’s “Song Sung Blue,” which hits theaters on Christmas Day. What emerges in both roles is something Belushi has been chasing his entire career — what he calls “the magic.”

It’s that moment onstage or on camera when preparation dissolves into pure presence, when the audience connects with something ineffable in his performance. The irony isn’t lost on him that it took a 35-year-old first-time director to unlock what Hollywood’s been missing.

“I don’t know if they’re boxing me in as much as they just don’t understand me because I am kind of all over the place,” he reflects. “I’ve done some independent films where people went, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t realize you could do that.’”

But he’s done it all along. From his film debut in Mann’s “Thief” to “Salvador” with Stone to his delightfully unhinged work in Lynch’s “Twin Peaks,” Belushi has been delivering complexity in plain sight.

If “Chronology” is steeped in sorrow, “Song Sung Blue” gives Belushi a different emotional register — one tinged with gentleness and the hard-won peace of a man who’s survived the whiplash of showbiz cycles.

Now, finally, people are looking. And what they’re finding is an actor who never stopped believing in the craft, who studies for three months even for small parts, who understands that talent doesn’t diminish with age — it deepens.

“There’s this moment when you’re performing and you connect with the audience,” Belushi says. “It’s magic inside your body. And all I do is chase the magic.”

He’s reflective now, but not sentimental. He speaks openly about regret, and about the time it takes to heal.

“I wish my recovery time was a little quicker,” he admits. “You either fall apart or you find a way through it.”

His relationship with grief — his own and the pain others share with him — is almost pastoral. He says he still dreams of his brother frequently. “I have dreams once in a while where he and I are acting at Second City,” he shares. “We were on stage together, and he was so funny that I cracked up, eating the scene in front of everybody. I got so mad at him, because that’s the worst thing you can do, is break character, right? But he was just so funny, and he goes, ‘Ah, come on, kid!’ He was sweet to me. So, I still get little visits.”

Belushi says people have approached him for years, quietly confiding, I lost my brother too.

“They want to know what to do,” he says softly. “And I went, OK, I see. I see now. Some of my purpose is to help guide others.”

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