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Despite a breakout performance in “My Girl” at 11 years old, the “Veep” alum and “Inventing Anna” star says auditions during adolescence were often brutally focused on her body.
Despite a breakthrough performance at only 11 years old when she starred alongside Macaulay Culkin in “My Girl” back in 1991, Anna Chlumsky nevertheless struggled with the Hollywood machine as adolescence kicked in.
“As a kid, you’re just along for the ride, but it can be extremely damaging,” Chlumsky told People in a new interview. It took what she described as an “out-of-body experience” when she was college-aged for her to realize, “I don’t have to do this anymore.”
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For Chlumsky, despite the critical acclaim of her performance in “My Girl,” she found the same sort of scrutiny and harsh brutality that most adolescent girls face as their bodies change and they try to navigate their way into young adulthood.
It’s a challenging enough time just to be inside your own head with your own thoughts, much less having to deal with the casting process analyzing everything about your physical appearance. Culkin would take a similar break through his own formative years from ’94-’03.
“Throughout my adolescence, I was not getting booked,” Chlumsky shared. “I was told I was too fat or too ugly. You live on a risk-reward system and I wasn’t getting much reward.”
And that’s when she had that experience that told her that just because this is all she’d known for so many years at this point, it isn’t all there is. “I knew I always wanted to go to school and get my education so I did that. And I’m glad that I did.”
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But the acting bug was real in Chlumsky, she just needed to come center and find herself before she was ready to step back into that world — this time, on her terms. That’s why she navigated her way back into entertainment through the stage experience, saying that it was Broadway productions that sparked inspiration in her again.
“it was alluring to apply my creativity towards something and tell a story — but of my own decision making,” she said. But even still, she was a little hesitant, telling the outlet she applied to the Atlantic Acting School with the intention of trying it out for a year to see if this was really her dream, or just that thing she did as a kid.
Luckily for her fans, she fell back in love immediately. “I realized, ‘I’m not giving this a year. I freaking love it. I’m giving this the rest of my life.’”
The “Inventing Anna” star would go on to a whole new level of acclaim and fan support when she joined Julia Louis-Dreyfus and became one of the big breakout stars of “Veep” across seven seasons, picking up six Emmy nominations along the way.
Now, Chlumsky can be seen in the lead role as the journalist who uncovered the truth behind Julia Garner’s Anna Delvey in “Inventing Anna,” now streaming on Netflix.
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