Joan Cusack spent the better part of two decades letting Hollywood forget about her. In a new interview ahead of Toy Story 5’s June 19 release, the Jessie voice actor finally explains, in her own unhurried way, why she walked. The answer is short, unembarrassed, and almost entirely about her two sons.
“It’s great to live your life and raise your kids and be in Chicago and be a normal person,” Cusack told Yahoo Entertainment in the days after the Toy Story 5 premiere. The 63-year-old Oscar nominee has been married to Chicago attorney Richard Burke since 1996. Their sons — Dylan, 28, and Miles, 25 — grew up in the city, not in the Los Angeles industry circuit.
Cusack’s last red carpet was 11 years ago. Her last live-action lead role, on Shameless, ended in 2018. Outside the Toy Story franchise — which she has voiced Jessie in continuously since 1999 — her IMDb credits over the past five years are mostly cameos, often in projects shot in Illinois. That is not, by her account, an accident.
In a 2014 essay for The Guardian, Cusack first laid out the philosophy she now repeats in 2026: “I want my kids to experience passion. I want them to see that I have things I feel passionate about because it is such a great feeling to really love something.” In Chicago, she has talked publicly about board service for Chicago-area nonprofits, a long-running role at her local children’s theater, and the gift shop she co-owned on Lincoln Avenue for years. The Hollywood version of that resume would have been three TV pilot seasons and a podcast.
Toy Story 5 was the project that made the trip back to Los Angeles worth it. The film is directed by Andrew Stanton, the Pixar veteran who co-wrote the original 1995 short, and reunites Tom Hanks’s Woody, Tim Allen’s Buzz Lightyear and Cusack’s Jessie with new characters voiced by Greta Lee and Conan O’Brien. Taylor Swift, recruited to write the film’s end-credits song as part of her first Original Song Oscar campaign, performed at the world premiere on June 9 at the Dolby Theatre.
Cusack’s return triggered a small reset of the rest of the press tour. First reactions to the film were rapturous, and the Pixar marketing operation has since leaned into the legacy-cast angle. Tom Hanks’s now-viral marriage advice to Taylor Swift happened on the same Dolby Theatre carpet on which Cusack made her first public appearance in more than a decade. Pixar also pushed Swift’s Toy Story 5 song into the studio’s Oscar packet within 48 hours of the premiere.
According to a parallel AOL Entertainment account of the same conversation, Cusack also addressed the contemporary question of whether you can build a serious acting career from outside Los Angeles in 2026. Her answer was practical: the Toy Story sessions could be recorded in any booth in Chicago, the Shameless years let her go home most weekends because the show shot in her own city, and she wrote the rest of her commitments around school pickup. The career, in other words, was shaped by geography first.
What the Toy Story 5 cycle has done is briefly reverse the geography. Cusack will sit for a small block of US press — a handful of late-night appearances and a Vanity Fair print piece are pencilled in — then go home. There is no Marvel reveal queued behind it. No prestige limited series. No podcast. Asked by Yahoo what she hopes the next decade of her career looks like, Cusack reportedly laughed, then said she would mostly like to spend it the way she has spent the last one.
For an industry currently obsessed with maximalism — Pink hosting the Tonys with her entire family, Taylor Swift mounting an Oscar campaign at her own film premiere, the Olsen twins choosing total silence at 40 — Cusack’s stance is its own kind of category. Show up for the work you actually believe in. Skip the rest. Go home to the people whose lives change shape when you’re not there. “Be a normal person,” as she put it in Chicago English. The Jessie of Toy Story 5 will arrive on June 19 sounding the same as she always has. The actor behind her, by design, has spent twenty years arranging her life so that none of the rest of it follows her back into the studio.
