The son of actor and madcap TV personality Gary Busey, Jake Busey spent his childhood on film and television sets in Los Angeles. While he was introduced to the entertainment industry at a young age, the younger Busey’s own acting career began as a glimmer of inspiration in a Santa Barbara City College acting class. From SBCC to professional actors’ training, his career blossomed in the 1990s with roles in films such as Twister, Starship Troopers, and Enemy of the State. Addiction and eventual sobriety led Busey through a period of turbulence, but the last five years have shown an uptick in his artistic productivity. Busey is poised for a big year, with roles in television shows Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the third installment of Stranger Things), as well as a role in the film The Predator, in theaters September 14. I recently spoke with Busey over the phone about his life and work.
Tell me about your experience in Santa Barbara. I went to Santa Barbara City College …. I took an acting class, and it was one of the oddest experiences I’ve had in my life. The entire class, we’d crawl on the floor, pretending we were a snake or a cat in the jungle. We did all this silly stuff through the whole semester, but at the end, [the instructor] said, “Here’s your final exam … it’s a performance.” She hands everyone a full-page monologue …. We hadn’t done any work with words, or standing movement, or vocalization, or anything! We’d only crawled on the floor! It was insanity! I was scared to death.
Do you spend time here now? I haven’t been up there in a while. I lived in Ventura from 2002 to 2007. It wasn’t as cool as Santa Barbara, and it was too far from L.A. I had to move back to L.A. to get my career back on track. It’s been a long road back, but now I’m on Stranger Things and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and The Predator movie is coming out this fall.