Joseph Michael Cross worked as a child actor, starring in the 1998 films Desperate Measures, Wide Awake, and Jack Frost. He won the Satellite Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture for Running with Scissors (2006) and co-starred in Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Untraceable (2008), Milk (2008), and Lincoln (2012). From 1999 to 2004, Cross starred as Casey Hughes in the CBS soap opera As the World Turns. In 2017, he appeared in the HBO limited series Big Little Lies and the Netflix crime drama series Mindhunter.