Nellie Andreeva

Joan Cusack has joined the cast of Showtime’s new drama series Shameless and appear in all 12 episodes of the new series. She’ll play the role of Sheila, an agoraphobic Chicago housewife with a sexually active teenage daughter who strikes up a special friendship with William H. Macy’s character, Frank Gallagher. She replaces Allison Janney, who played the role in the pilot but had to pull out because of her commitment to ABC’s Mr. Sunshine after the producers of Shameless decided to make the character more prominent than originally planned. Production on the  series begins in mid-September for a January 9 premiere.

Cusack, nominated for an Oscar for Working Girl and In & Out, most recently reprised her role as the voice of Jessie in Toy Story 3. Shameless, from John Wells and Paul Abbott, is based on the long-running hit UK series and stars William H. Macy and Emmy Rossum. Macy plays a far-from-stellar working-class patriarch of an unconventional Chicago brood of six motley kids whose eldest daughter (Rossum) keeps the home afloat while he’s out drinking and carousing. The series co-stars Justin Chatwin, Ethan Cutkosky, Shanola Hampton, Steve Howey, Emma Kenney, Cameron Monaghan, Jeremy Allen White and Laura Slade Wiggins.

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