by Todd Gilchrist

US, March 18, 2005 - For the past two decades, Joan Cusack has been one of Hollywood's most reliable comediennes. She started her career with cameo roles in Sixteen Candles and Class alongside her brother John, and soon grew into one of the industry's funniest females; Broadcast News, Working Girl, and Toy Story 2 may have possessed decidedly more bankable stars as their marquee attractions, but she sold the undercard and even stole some of the A-list limelight. In the new family film Ice Princess, she serves the same purpose, this time ironically as a dramatic counterpoint to the teenaged tomfoolery; as she recently described to IGN FilmForce, she thrilled at the prospect of portraying a parent, but still relishes having a career – and a lifestyle – where she isn't plugged directly into the moviemaking mainframe.

Ice Princess follows a young bookworm named Casey (Michelle Trachtenberg) who decides to abandon her safe adolescent existence as a student and strike out in the world of competitive figure skating after uncovering a mathematical formula which makes it possible to complete those jumps, twists and turns with hair-trigger precision. Cusack, who resides in Chicago, far removed from the glare of Tinseltown, says that her experience with skating, figure or otherwise, was largely peripheral prior to working on the movie.

"Skating is big in Chicago," Cusack says. "There's a lot of hockey; a lot of the boys play hockey. And figure skating is big. I mean, I don't have girls, so I don't know that whole thing that much, whereas my son plays hockey. [But] we went one day because they were having this ice skating show of all of the girls, and it was huge. It was like all of the dresses and the things and all of the outfits and the moms and all of the members and they were doing a big show; it was big."

While the film itself obviously explores that world, Cusack says that the underpinnings of her character's conflict – whether to support her daughter's pie-in-the-sky ambitions or encourage more practical ones – became the story element she focused on, not the least of which because of her personal responsibilities as a parent. "That's a huge balance, I think, with kids– trying to find the right [balance]," she explains. "It's everything, you know – it's social life, it's academics, it's sports." For her money, however, she says there are slightly less specific goals she aims for with her own kids.

"I actually think that having a good sense of themselves is the most important thing, you know, actually kind of more emotional intelligence," she says. "Because then you can say, 'Okay, here's a challenge I think you can handle,' and they can go for it freely. Or 'I see this in you – you're good in this – you're good in that. Do it and enjoy it.' It's not a struggle as much when they have a good sense of themselves, I think.

"When they don't have that it's hard to do everything, you know, and then you're pushing, and they don't know what they really like."

Cusack says that most of the leg work was done in the script to develop her character's strong relationship with her daughter, but it generated some interesting questions among the cast and crew. "There was a lot of that in the script already, which was nice," she remembers. "It's something I'm interested in, and that was one of the things I liked about the movie, that it had parenting stuff in it. So we talked about it, what really is going on, and that was nice to have those kind of discussions." Ultimately, she was attracted to the purposefulness of the role, both personally and professionally. "We talked a lot about that, which was so fun, because it's meaningful to me – you feel like you're doing something that's meaningful."

In recent years, Cusack's played her share of stern authority figures, including in 2002's School of Rock and last summer's Raising Helen. But she says the shift is more a product of her age and Hollywood's perception of women than anything intentional. "Well, some of it, I think, is culture and movie culture, and the kind of roles that people write, and what's available and what's available to me living in Chicago and trying to balance my own parental concerns with – you know, being a good parent and trying to make it work and do this," she says. "Maybe I'm more drawn to those kind of parts because they are meaningful to me. I mean, more parent-y ones, I find them interesting to do."

One of the themes the film addresses obliquely is single parenting, which frequently changes the essential nature of the relationship between that parent and his or her child. Cusack says she's thankfully never confronted that situation in real life, but she was able to interpolate that into her performance in the film. "I can't imagine being a single parent or a single parent that doesn't have a lot of money," she says, referencing her character's financial woes. "That's a big, huge impact on your life and your dynamic and everything – I mean, that's huge. It affects how much you have a break from just concentrating on just one other person in your life. It becomes so myopic that way, and more intense, probably. I think it's a huge difference."

She says she intensified the on screen bond to reflect that kind of 'emotional myopia,' as she put it. "I think it's a little harder to let go in a lot of ways, to let them be separate from you," she says. "I mean, this is a time when they're going to college, so really, that's it."

As the parent of two boys, she contends there aren't that many correlating conflicts that have yet arisen in her real life, but she does admit that playing a parent on screen occasionally enlightens her off-camera family life. "I think it's fun to have work that you can relate to, that you can feel like is meaningful," she reiterates. "I mean, I might think that's a thing that a lot of parents do. I see it in my own parenting all the time; I definitely don't want them to be actors; that would be hard, if my sons wanted to do that, because it's a really tough life, and you wouldn't want to put that on your kid.

"You see it in small ways with they have a friend that they want to play with that is not the best influence, but they really want to play with that person," she continues, reflecting on the film's exploration of the respective goals of parents and their children. "There's so much you can shape and so much you've just got to say, 'He has so much fun with that kid'; you've got to let him do it.

"It just kind of reinforces good to think about, important to think about, fun to sit and talk about [things], you know?"