Jim Belushi is having another moment. The 71-year-old actor has spent December pinballing between red carpets and media hits to promote a pair of new movies. In between, he’s driven up the New Jersey coast, visiting several dispensaries to celebrate his cannabis brand’s partnership with High Grass Farms. And he capped off his east-coast adventures by sharing the stage with his daughter, Jami, and the James Montgomery Blues Band, headlining Rhode Island blues shows in Newport and Cape Cod. A very Belushi blend of family, work, and fun. “It happens every so often when everything kind of lines up,” he tells GQ, checking in from a Manhattan hotel. “I feel very lucky this year.”

The “luck” started with a supporting role in The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir. He pops in about halfway as Ken Kesey, the generational LSD-guru author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who takes Lidia under his wing in a creative writing class at the University of Oregon. As a tender, goofy, pot-smoking professor, Belushi leaves a mark on the movie in a role perfectly suited for him. “When [Kristen] looks at you and directs you, it’s like she can scan your body and your heart and knows where you’re at and knows just what to pull out,” he says.

For his second act, Belushi shows up in Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue, the impossibly tragic and inspiring true story of “Lightning and Thunder,” a.k.a. Mike and Claire Sardina, a Neil Diamond tribute band embodied by Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson. (The movie is adapted from the equally fascinating 2008 documentary about the music act.) As Tom D’Amato, the duo’s manager, Belushi chews up his scenes with a thick, blubbery Milwaukee accent, and engages the waterworks more than a few times during their performances. “The scenes felt lyrical, musical,” he says. “We just sat in the same rhythm and Craig brought that rhythm to every scene in that movie.”

It’s been a while since Belushi has spent this much time in the spotlight. He’s dabbled in small film roles over the last several years, but has mostly invested his time into Belushi Farms, the Oregon cannabis farm that he launched around 2015 and has grown into a formidable venture. As he discussed his latest movies and experiences, Belushi explained the rationale behind pouring himself into varieties of work at his age: “If you don’t keep moving then you start thinking. You start thinking, you go into the rabbit hole and you start going through the [Instagram] reels,” he says. “That is what I’m trying to prevent.”

GQ: These two movies are your highest-profile acting roles in a while. What motivated you to get off the farm and spend some in-depth time on these projects?

Jim Belushi: Well, I told my manager and agents, I said, “Look, I don’t want you to give me work. I want you to give me a gig, man.” I’m a musician and I like playing gigs. It’s inspirational, it’s passionate, it’s fun. I’ve been murdered, I’ve murdered people, I’ve crashed cars—all with no consequences. I’ve worked with Oliver Stone, Walter Hill, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Woody Allen, Mr. [Roman] Polanski. I’ve worked with some great Academy Award-winning actors, from Michael Caine to Kate Winslet to James Woods. I mean, I really have a wonderful, wonderful career. I said, “Find me something that’s unusual and fun! I don’t care about the size of the role, I just want to be inspired!” And they came up with these two beautiful pieces.

Ken Kesey feels like an ideal character for you—an Oregon professor who loves pot. How did you find out about this role?

It came out of the blue. I actually talked to one of the producers on the set when we were filming in Lafayette. I went, “How the hell did you find me?” She goes, “I kept bringing people to Kristen and she just kept saying no, and then I brought your picture and she goes, ‘Yes!’ And that was it.” I realize, in retrospect, that because of her depth and her sixth sense of the world, she knew that Ken Kesey had suffered a terrible loss in his son. He was on the way to a wrestling tournament in Seattle, the bus went off the ledge of a mountain—a terrible thing that happened to him. And the main character also had a terrific loss. There were two great lines in the movie. One is, “Nobody understands death anymore. They either don’t say anything or what they do say is asinine.” And Lidia says, “I don’t think that much about death.” And Ken goes, “Ah, she gets it. She knows what I know.” There’s another line: “Nobody is big enough to hold what happens to us.” Such a great line that Kristen put it in the movie twice.

Yeah, that’s the line that stuck with me from this movie.

It stuck with me personally. I’m forgiving everybody that doesn’t understand me because they’re not big enough to hold what happened. And when he says to the character, “It’s in your hands,” he means it metaphorically. What happened to us is in our own hands. But the way out of it is through your hands—through writing. And I myself have had great trauma, great loss. And I realized the only way through it for me was acting. So the creative spirit is created through loss and grief. And also joyful things. So maybe Kristen knew that when she saw my face.

When you’re working through some of those very potent and charged scenes that you’re talking about, does it help you to kind of tap into some of your family history? Or do you try not to go there specifically?

It’s neither. I studied the character for three months, and in the study, I would draw lines and parallels to things that happened in my life because you have to make it real and authentic to you. But when you’re doing it, you don’t think about any of that. You just trust that it’ll be there. It’s a hard thing to do, but you do it and it comes out.

Was it cathartic to kind of work through some of these dialogue scenes and talk about death like this?

No, no, no. I didn’t talk to Kristen about it either. Except for that one moment. I kind of just threw the line away when we were sitting there by the little memorial of the sun. She stopped me and she goes, “Jim, did you hear what she just said? She’s the only one that gets you. You found somebody that is big enough to hold what happened to you. It’s a kindred spirit. That’s joyful.” And so I do a little smile at her like, “Yeah brotherhood, sisterhood.” Kristen knew every moment between every line and every image of that movie. She’s phenomenal.

I saw you recently called her your “shaman.”

I’ll tell you why. The interviewer said she was kind of like the general on the set. I went, “No, not a general.” What she got out of Lidia is like a shaman pulling out the spirits, pulling out the depth that you’ve ignored. The way she ran the set and ran the scenes were like that of a knowledgeable shaman of Peru, of Colombia, of Brazil—one of those beautiful shamans that brings out the spirit. She’s beautiful.

What more did you learn about Ken Kesey in your three months of research?

His humanity. I mean, she let me improvise. And I added a lot of lines that I had heard him say. As he explains it, his wife was a Bible study girl, taught Sunday school, all of that stuff. And he said, “She never pushed it on me—just like I didn’t push amyl nitrate on her.” [laughs] But he walked by her one day and she was studying the Ten Commandments. He looked over her shoulder and said, “There’s one missing.” She said, “What do you mean?” He said, “It’s the 11th Commandment, but it should be the First Commandment: “Have mercy.” When you walk out of a store and there’s a man or woman on the street asking for money, give them a buck. Have mercy on men, have mercy on women, have mercy on our society. The way he talks was so beautiful.

And you say that line in the movie…

Yeah, she let me. I did that on that walk.”Have mercy. I’m gonna rewrite the Bible.” That one really moved me, but also this is way back when cannabis was just so illegal. He was like, “There’s 492,000 deaths a year attributed to cigarette smoking and second-hand smoke; there’s 190,000 deaths attributed to alcohol; 110,000 deaths attributed to opiate overdoses. And there’s no deaths attributed to pot.” And he goes, “The government knows all these facts and how many it kills, but they still regulate it, let people sell it, and they lock up these people for cannabis.”

He was the consciousness of a generation. He took it from bohemia to the hippies. He worked as an orderly in a hospital, in this psychiatric ward—hence One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But they had a lot of experimental drugs there. And he stole the LSD. And he put it in Kool-Aid at his farm and invited friends. And then all of a sudden, these parties on Saturday night became huge. And everybody was drinking electric Kool-Aid. And, by the way, there was a little band that was just starting out called the Grateful Dead. It spread through San Francisco, Southern California. LSD changed the consciousness of a generation. It brought compassion. The age of Aquarius. He says the line, “I want one of you writers in this room to change culture.” I think he wanted to be an actor. Never quite got there—but he was a bit of a clown with the hats.

Your wardrobe was pretty fun in this. You’ve got that intricate gold chain and the red beret.

That was him, man. He dressed up. I saw footage of this one Grateful Dead concert. They lowered him from the ceiling and he was doing all this stuff with his hands and his feet. This guy wanted to be a performer. So I carried it on for him.

Song Sung Blue is such a contrast to Chronology of Water in terms of form.

Well, Chronology of Water—I haven’t seen a form like that. Come on! I’ve never seen a movie cut like that, told like that. You don’t even hear the lead character’s voice for 20 minutes into the film. Kristen is an auteur breaking boundaries in storytelling.

Can you feel a difference on set when you are in a movie that is a little bit more experimental versus one whose aim is more mainstream?

No. It’s all the same work. It’s all highly focused, specific, detailed work. It’s in the editing where they create that illusion.

How much information did you have about Tom?

He had a few interviews in the documentary. And he was the nicest guy. Milwaukee, Midwestern. He was the general manager at K-mart for 35 years. He was a good leader. They all loved Tom. He was a Marine before that. He was no pushover. That’s why in Song Song Blue, when I started that fight with that guy, I go, “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m a Marine.”

Is that why you have a megaphone, too?

Oh, yeah. He’s a lot like Ken Kesey. I think he wants to be a performer. And he’s not. But he had an eye for passion. And when he saw that dedication and the passion in Mike, he fell in love with him. He was in love with them. And he wanted to do anything he could to get that passion out—to let other people feel it. His dream was to get them to Vegas. I met his daughter at the premiere in LA and she was very sweet and she started to tear up a little bit because she said, “You really captured my dad. He had the biggest heart. it was it was just so wonderful to see him.”

How much fun is a Milwaukee accent? And how much of a difference is it from Chicago?

Well, you know, Kate really nailed the accent. I didn’t want to go too far with it because I didn’t want it to sound like a character. But I got it in there a little bit. It was kind of funny. It changed the shape of the character for me, absolutely. But I got a little in there.

In what ways does an accent change something like that for you?

It elevated the performance for me. Because I think my voice would have been more somber of a character. And because there was that little lilt at the end. It kind of kept Tom’s music up.

What is it like being on a set filled with Neil Diamond music?

We’re all familiar with Neil Diamond. But there were songs that I’d never heard that I’d fall in love with. There is a problem when you’re shooting those concert scenes all day. You hear that same song all day, and you cannot get to sleep at night. “Sweeeee Carolineeee…Bah, bah, bahhhh.”