In the passenger seat of a car somewhere in California, an 81-year-old face fills the frame. The gaze is unblinking, the energy high-frequency, and the message is startlingly direct: Gary Busey has a Christmas present for you. It isn’t a trailer for a new noir thriller or a polished holiday greeting; it is a rapid-fire, high-decibel lesson in the vocalizations of geese. To the casual scroller, it’s another viral “Buseyism,” but to those who have followed the long, strange arc of his life, it feels like a startling broadcast from a wavelength most people gave up on long ago.
It is difficult to reconcile this unfiltered man with the incandescent energy of 1978. Back then, Busey didn’t just play Buddy Holly; he inhabited him with a terrifying, Oscar-nominated precision, singing every note and playing every lick with a grit that defined “New Hollywood” brilliance. He was a cinematic powerhouse, the man who could flip from the tragic rock star to the cold-blooded precision of Lethal Weapon’s Mr. Joshua or the rugged intensity of Point Break.
The pivot point—the tectonic shift—came on a stretch of asphalt in 1988. The motorcycle accident that nearly took his life rewrote the internal map of his brain. The uninhibited joy and the impulsive, rapid-fire honks we see today aren’t just quirks; they are the biological residue of survival. Since that crash, the “filters” most of us use to navigate the world have been stripped away, leaving behind a man who operates without a safety net.
When Busey mimics those geese, explaining that they honk to “let you know they’re up there,” he might as well be talking about himself. He is a signal from the stratosphere, a reminder that the human experience is messy, loud, and entirely unpredictable. While we often demand our icons age with a quiet, curated poise,
Busey is giving us something more robust. In a world of filtered perfection, there is something honest about an 81-year-old man who just wants to look you in the eye and honk like a goose, unblinking and entirely himself.