That's Our Girl

Anna Chlumsky's fan base, is extremely weird. See, for instance, Annachlumsky.org, "Your number one source for all things Anna." It features a forum -"omg omg i love u ur my hero and idol"- and lots of teenybopper stuff. The most bizarre example is a music video set to the Temptations' "My Girl," filled with clips of Chlumsky as Vada Sultenfuss- only here, reenacted with Sims avatars. Now, this stuff might seem no weirder than what you'd find on, say, a Miley Cyrus fan site. Except My Girl happens to be almost 20 years old. Chlumsky basically retired from acting a couple of years after making it.

All of which goes to prove that Chlumsky, now 28, has always been with us- even though she's been out of sight - in that dreamland where the stars of our childhood movies write poems, nurse crushes, and eat ice cream for dinner.

But now she's back. Her new film, In the Loop, directed by Armando Lannucci, opens this summer. The political farce pits acid-tongued, wily bureaucrats against each other in the rush to a brain-dead, preemptive war in the Middle East. It's like the West Wing, if it were to be remade by the writers of the British version of The Office. Chlumsky plays Liza Weld, a plucky aide at the State Department and the author of a report that - if leaked -has the power to derail the war altogether.

This movie is the reason Chlumsky is sitting across from me-hair pulled back, wearing a brown turtleneck, smiling widely- at a restaurant near her home in Brooklyn. "It wasn't about art," she says of her years as a child star. She swirls the red wine in her glass. "It was about pleasing people." So she quit. "When I started to feel like I had to have jobs, everything was tainted."

Instead, she went to college in her hometown, at the University of Chicago, where she studied international relations. She toyed with acting again, but the one audition she went on seemed wrong, like a visit to her former self. The thought of retuning to the craft seriously didn't occur to her until she moved to New York after graduation. There, she lived the workaday life of an ambitious twentysomething. She was a fact checker at Zagat, then an editorial assistant for a publisher of sci-fi novels. "I was geeking out! I spent 9 to 5 reading about princesses and goblins. But I was still crying at lunch every day." That's when it hit her. "I remember seeing Mercedes Ruehl, in The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? And I thought, This is totally different from anything I ever did in acting. I want to do that."

So she started taking classes, which she'd never really done before. "When you're a kid, acting comes easy because everything comes out truthful. As an adult, you develop ways to mask that truth. Acting class was about getting that honesty back." She started back at the bottom: hustling for off-off-Broadway gigs; an episode of Law & Order; a cameo on 30 Rock; a couple of tiny movies.

Then there's In the Loop. And she brings to the table something that few child actors ever have: a real-life experience.
--CLIFF KUANG