When Joan Cusack stepped out for the Toy Story 5 premiere on Thursday evening, the internet quickly settled on the story: After 11 years away from the red carpet, the beloved actor had returned to the limelight.
It’s an irresistible narrative. After all, Cusack’s a true Hollywood great, with a résumé to prove it. As the daughter of actor Dick Cusack and the sister of John Cusack, she may be from a show business family, but she became famous on the strength of her own work. Her distinctive comic presence — and voice — has led to her being nominated for Academy Awards twice (for her roles in Working Girl and In and Out), and she has appeared in a number of films that have either won or been nominated for Academy Awards, including Klaus and, of course, the Toy Story franchise.
It was a Saturday Night Live season in the mid-1980s that put Cusack in front of a mainstream American TV audience, but her Hollywood breakthrough came a few years later, when she landed the role of Cyn — alongside Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver — in Working Girl. Cusack quickly showed audiences that you don’t need to be the lead in a production to be indispensable.
Instead, Cusack built a career out of making every role she’s played — from the best friend in Runaway Bride to the love interest in School of Rock — her own, and entirely unforgettable.
So, when she appeared at the London premiere on Thursday night to promote her return as Jessie, it was easy to frame the moment as a comeback. However, the truth — we hate to break it to you — looks to be far less dramatic. An actor can stop appearing at photographed events without vanishing; instead, they can work selectively or pick up more roles in voice or television, remaining very present.
Jessie and Joan Cusack attend the Toy Story 5 UK launch event May 28 in London.
(Jeff Spicer/Getty Images)
What Joan Cusack has been doing
Rather than intentionally swerving red carpets, Cusack has simply been building a life away from the demands of film and television. While raising her two (now adult) children and working on Shameless in Chicago in 2011, Cusack opened a lifestyle shop, Judy Maxwell Home, in the city. “My kids were young, and I didn’t really want to take acting work, because I always had to go away,” she told The New Yorker in 2019. “I was trying to think of something to do, because I’m not really a big cooking person.”
In the same interview, Cusack admitted that acting “isn’t that fun” compared to running her shop. “It’s just not that great of a world, except for being exposed to cool sets and talented, interesting people. But this is so fun.”
While Cusack’s last red carpet appearance was at the Showtime 2015 Emmy Eve Party, her acting work quietly continued. Toy Story 4 was released in 2019, nine years after the previous installment, and so was Klaus. Another Netflix film, Let It Snow, also came out in 2019. Other TV and film work included guest-starring roles on Season 2 of Homecoming in 2020 and on A Series of Unfortunate Events from 2017 to 2019. IMDB cites seven additional roles for Cusack since 2015.
Reprising the role of Toy Story’s Jessie was too enticing an offer to refuse, particularly because the fierce cowgirl Cusack plays is such a focal point in the upcoming film. “It’s Jessie’s story,” she said during an interview on Virgin Radio U.K. on May 28. “It’s glorious.”
