Jim Belushi reveals how he developed his characters for 'Song Sung Blue' and 'The Chronology of Water'

Spaceballs, I passed on that movie like an idiot

You did? Shh! Okay. Don't want to talk about it. Okay. There's two movies I passed on that I'm just so pissed about

What's the other one? My Cousin Vinny. You passed on My Cousin Vinny? Yeah, yeah, yeah

I didn't say I was smart. I said I was an actor. So you would have been Vinny

Yeah. As opposed to Melissa Torme? I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to listen to my part

My biological cock is ticked. I need to get annoyed. Let's start off there then

I mean, as far as... Start on passing on movies that are regrets? Let's start on all your regrets

Let's start right with regrets. All right, let's start with regrets. In seeing the two films that you have out now..

Oh, my God, they're so good. They're so good and so different

And the character work you're doing in these films is wild to me

Seeing you completely transform into, like, Ken Kesey was incredible. Oh, Ken Kesey, what a marvelous, marvelous man he was

Yeah. He changed the culture. He was a culture-changing figure. I mean he took the world from that Bohemian climate you know with Kerouac and all those guys and brought LSD the electric Kool assets I mean he changed the consciousness of a generation

He took them right to, there it is, electric Kool-Aid assets. It's one of my favorite books

Yeah, yeah. He was the consciousness of the 60s. 100%. When I was in Chicago and I was learning character, there was a very big difference between impersonating and getting the essence

Well, you know, that's very astute of you because at Second City, there was a phrase, you know, you wear a character like a straw hat

You lightly wear the character. But, you know, John, he had beautiful imitations

You know, whether it was Henry Kissinger, you know, Captain Kirk. But you always saw John through those characters, the essence of who John was

and when I did this Ken Kesey, I talked to Kristen Stewart

I said, you don't want me to do an impression, an impersonation, do you? She goes, no

I said, good. Because I really don want to mimic Ken Kesey I want to capture his essence of his humanity And she said good Yeah so I made an active choice not to do an impersonation of him Kristen I just don understand what she has

But she has this presence in her eyes and this focus and this knowledge of death, grief, loss

It's very sophisticated. She brought out the best performance of my career, I think

I want to dovetail into SongSongBlue. I'm interested in how you approached Tom as opposed to Ken

Was your process different in approaching him versus Ken? Yeah, it was different

It was different because I didn't have the history on him that I could get with Ken

Literally, lines of keysies dropped into my skull. When you're improvising, you just trust what's in your head and you go

So lines were coming out of me. Tom was, I just caught his essence

and what I sensed in the documentary about Tom was he just loved them. He was just so

enamored at the passion that they had And I think he wanted to have that passion himself and he knew he didn have that kind of passion but he could be in service of it and that was enough for him I mean here a man who was the general manager for Kmart for 35 years

You know, I mean, he was just a Milwaukee guy, Marine, by the way

Milwaukee guy, had passion for them and loved them. So I just played the love and wanting to do the best for them

And the screening we had, the premiere we had in Los Angeles, I met the daughter

And she was just so happy. She said, you really, really captured my dad

And she, like, teared up. And I said, well, he had a big heart

I goes, yes, he did. It was so sweet. It was so darling. So I just played open-hearted

Yeah. You know, and I just played love. That's it. TZO's playing a lot of the other things going on

The line in Song Song Blue that made me laugh out loud in a theater was after the fight

and you're just like, oh, it's okay, I'm a bleeder. I'm a bleeder. That I improvised

Okay. That was mine. That was great