Anna Chlumsky was so adorable in the 1991 movie My Girl, playing the precocious Vada Sultenfuss, that people can’t seem to forget it. Or at least they don’t want to.
When the actress, now 41, was asked in a new Elle profile whether she gets sick of talking about the dramedy, which co-starred Macaulay Culkin, Jamie Lee Curtis and Dan Aykroyd, she was very honest.
“Yes. Unequivocally,” Chlumsky answered. “You ever get sick of talking about that recital you did when you were 10?… Even though it’s been 30 years, people still want to be like, ‘Oh no, but I still own you.’ It’s really strange. I used to just think it was lazy. But now I have to think that there’s something more to it.”
After Chlumsky, who received her first credited role in the film, starred in My Girl 2 in 1994 and did a few more projects, she ended up going to college and working in the corporate world. There weren’t roles for her anyway. Then one day, on a break from her job at a publishing company, she encountered a fortune teller.
“She’s like, ‘Are you the girl from My Girl?'” Chlumsky said. “I’m like, God dammit. Today? And then she’s, ‘Wait. You’re not done. You want to keep doing it.'”
A palm reading later and Chlumsky was convinced. She went on to costar on Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s HBO comedy Veep. She racked up six Emmy nominations for playing the part of Amy Brookheimer, politician Selina Meyer’s chief-of-staff, and some recognition for work that she had done as an adult.
“People started recognizing me on the street for Veep instead of for some bulls**t I did when I was 10,” Chlumsky said. “It was the first time that I ever understood what it felt like to be happy to be asked about your job by a stranger.”
In her next role, Chlumsky plays a journalist uncovering German heiress Anna Delvey’s truth in a dramatization of the convicted con artist’s story, Inventing Anna, which premieres Friday, Feb. 11.
