Entertaining audiences is in Joan Cusack’s DNA. A crackling, high-voltage live wire who commits to scenes with an intensely funny mischievous ferocity, Cusack appeared in a few bit screen parts in the early ’80s, including “Sixteen Candles,” before she earned a place as a cast member of “Saturday Night Live,” where she stayed for a single season before venturing on to bigger film roles.
One of six actors in her large Irish Chicago family, including her father Dick and siblings John, Ann, Susie, and Bill, Joan has so far received two Academy Award nominations as Best Supporting Actress, for “Working Girl” and “In & Out,” five consecutive Primetime Emmy nominations as Outstanding Guest Actress for her role on “Shameless” (receiving one), and has over ninety screen credits to her name.
While likely most famous for her voice work as the irrepressible cowgirl Jessie from Pixar’s “Toy Story 2” (and beyond), for the first few decades of her career, Joan Cusack was most often cast as a quirky yet always warmhearted best friend, sister, wife, or mother, often simultaneously delivering tirades and winning hearts. A Best Supporting Actress MVP, who you just know would’ve fit right in decades earlier as Doris Day’s or Irene Dunne’s best friend, Joan Cusack paved the way for actresses like Parker Posey, Judy Greer, and Melissa McCarthy to lean into their unpredictability, innate comic timing, and offbeat approach.
While I could’ve easily written about over a dozen of my favorite Joan Cusack performances and encourage you to seek out some of her most underseen pictures (like “Men Don’t Leave” and “Arlington Road” alongside more popular entries like “School of Rock” and “High Fidelity”), here are five scenes I love in five likely unexpected movies to illustrate what makes her such an awesome joy to watch.
As Blair Litton in “Broadcast News” (1987)
When they wrapped one of the classic James L. Brooks films’ most famous scenes, everyone was so impressed with Joan Cusack’s desperate, breakneck, madcap dash to deliver a newly edited video across a crowded newsroom obstacle course with zero seconds to spare that they gave the actress a horseshoe wreath that signaled she finished the race like a thoroughbred champ. Enlisting the aid of everything from newspapers to floor spray to ace that terrifyingly screwball file cabinet slide, the scene begins with what would eventually become one of Cusack’s signature highly verbal freakouts, before she dissolves into pained, hyperventilated gasps. She grabs the tape from Holly Hunter like a baton that she must pass, and once it’s in her hand, Cusack doesn’t just sprint—she runs, jumps over a toddler, and crashes into a water fountain, in a bravura moment of open workspace shock and awe.
Joan Cusack described the scene in a 2000 interview with NPR as one of her “favorite things” that she’s done as a performer. Inspired and instantly memorable, writer-director James L. Brooks based the sequence on a similar chaotic run he witnessed taking place by a TV producer in an NBC newsroom. One year later, Joan Cusack was cast in director Mike Nichols’ “Working Girl.” It was her first of many best-friend roles, and with it, she would become the first former regular cast member of “Saturday Night Live” to be nominated for an Academy Award. So you could say that “Broadcast News” was where Joan’s career as the MVP scene-stealing best supporting actress was truly born.
As Hannah Stubbs in “My Blue Heaven” (1990)
When the no-nonsense Assistant District Attorney Hannah Stubbs (Cusack) interrogates Steve Martin’s flamboyantly suited, toothpick-chewing, slick New York–accented liar, she has no idea that the man spinning yarns into hilariously illogical tapestries is, in all actuality, an ex-mobster who showed up in her peaceful southern California community in witness protection. Unable to tolerate the boredom of suburbia, he falls back into his old habits almost as soon as he arrives, kicking off a crime spree just to have something to do. “My Blue Heaven” is screenwriter Nora Ephron’s own retelling of the Henry Hill saga, which inspired her husband Nicholas Pileggi to write the book Wiseguy, which became director Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (also released in ’90).
Word is that Hill had no idea that Ephron was even writing this script, and occasionally, before passing the phone onto her husband when the ex-mobster called their house, she would pepper him with questions. Angry once the film was released and he knew he’d been played without financial gain, in interviews, Hill made an ominous observation that he might have retaliated, “if she was anybody else’s wife…”
Rick Moranis plays the straight man to Steve Martin throughout director Herbert Ross’s sunny crime comedy “My Blue Heaven.” Cusack plays a variation of that same comedic foil, as she tries to hold him accountable for his actions, eventually gets involved with Moranis, and, in one memorable moment, gets blackmailed by the observant Vinnie for replacing her son’s pet turtle, which she accidentally “whacked” while washing dishes.
She’s able to go a little broader than Moranis as the voice of both incredulity and common sense, but Cusack brings unexpected depth to what could otherwise have been a typical screen power-suited ball-busting role of the kind we often saw in the era. Her work in “My Blue Heaven” foreshadows the same heart that shines through her performance opposite Jack Black as the misunderstood, strict Stevie Nicks–loving school principal in “School of Rock” (2003).
As Debbie Jelinsky in “Addams Family Values” (1993)
Loving wife Morticia (Anjelica Huston) wears black, but in “Addams Family Values,” Joan Cusack’s black-widow femme fatale, Debbie, wears white. Over the years, director Barry Sonnenfeld’s sequel to Tim Burton’s big-screen adaptation of the classic television series has become even more beloved among cult movie fans than the original. Playing a nanny we discover is a gold-digging black widow, Cusack rides the waves of the unhinged character’s sudden tonal and vocal pitch shifts like a professional surfer, approaching Uncle Fester’s (Christopher Lloyd) twisted new love interest with the same hard-charging energy that endeared her to audiences watching her rush that videotape from one end of a perilous newsroom to another in 1987’s “Broadcast News.”
But thankfully, this time she’s a leading lady. Going from narcissistic self-pity to murderous rage in two seconds flat, Cusack gives one of the film’s most memorable, uproarious monologues, recounting Debbie’s evil origin story, which began when she was given a Malibu Barbie for her birthday instead of a ballerina. Willing to embrace her darker sensibilities, she dials up to a 10 in “Addams Family Values.” Those curious to see Cusack play someone who may or may not be all that she seems should be sure to check out the underdiscussed “Arlington Road,” which was released in 1999, alongside four other features starring Cusack, including the instantly beloved “Toy Story 2.”
As Emily Montgomery in “In & Out” (1997)
“Does anybody here know how many times I’ve had to watch FUNNY LADY?!” Joan Cusack walks a tightrope in director Frank Oz’s “In & Out” as the beautiful, sweet, loving, supportive fiancée of fellow high school teacher Kevin Kline, who learns on her wedding day that the man she lost weight for, who picked out her wedding dress, and whom she was eager to spend her life with, is gay.
There’s an old rule of thumb in acting that you never want to start so high that there’s nowhere for you to go, and that’s exactly what she does here, moving through a range of emotions from sad to mad to incredulous to devastated in a matter of minutes so effectively that she earned a second Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her work. If she played it without that comedic edge and without foreshadowing that she could possibly find love with a man who’d long carried a torch (played by Matt Dillon), it would have been unbearable to watch this woman’s heart breaking, and if it had just flashed to anger, she would’ve become the villain of the film.
But everyone who’s been betrayed by someone they trusted can recognize every stage of grief this woman goes through, and we need someone like Cusack, who feels like everyone’s sister, neighbor, favorite aunt, and lunch buddy, to make it work. In fact, watching this film again for the first time since its release, I realized that while, of course, we care about Klein’s character’s journey to accept and admit he’s gay, Cusack’s Emily Montgomery is the one I feel for most throughout. After all, now she realizes that she should’ve thought long and hard about his “Streisand thing” before she let him pick out her stunning dress.
As Marcella in “Grosse Pointe Blank” (1997)
In a wildly charismatic turn in “Grosse Pointe Blank,” Marcela (Joan Cusack), plays the office manager, assistant, and all-around Girl Friday to hitman boss Martin Blank (John Cusack). On call-waiting in the midst of an expletive-filled rant, she tells her friend that chicken, celery, and carrots are “just the base of the soup,” but you’ve got to add other flavors. Although it’s a boldly unexpected moment of levity, revisiting it, I realized she might as well have been talking about her role in her real-life brother John Cusack’s screen career.
Since the two first started making movies, Cusack has added unmistakably memorable flavor, a gentle heart, fiery wit, and explosive moments to the scenes she often has in John Cusack’s movies, from the frazzled, overstressed big sister to his lead in “Say Anything…” (1989) to one of his friends ready to chew him out for the way he treated his ex in “High Fidelity” (2000). Making the most out of her minor role in “Grosse Pointe Blank,” and largely seen on the phone, Joan uses the power of her voice to match her brother’s equally kinetic energy throughout the film, such as when they play off one another while discussing one villain who’s into “odd Native American art” and ballroom dancing, to this moment when, in between trading recipes with her friend, she morphs into Samuel L. Jackson, delivering the word “goddamn” exactly like he did in “Pulp Fiction.”
Yet what’s interesting about the two, side by side, is that in John we see someone who’s more introspective and implosive. When he gets worked up, he’ll launch into a paragraph instead of a sentence, but mostly, he’s the guy who’s always in motion, involuntarily fidgeting, bobbing a knee, jumping onto a higher perch, where as Joan has always approached her characters’ energy explosively, going from a zero to an eleven and back down again faster than a Ferrari accelerating into a curve without brakes. One of my favorite cult comedies from the ’90s, where each character we meet fascinates (and more Cusacks appear as well), Joan Cusack is so terrific as Marcela that she deserves her own spin-off.