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"I'm also stopped on the street for my work on 'Veep,'" she says. "'My Girl' is a very good film, and it resonated with a lot of people. I don't want to make people forget it, but I like to focus on the present."
The present hasn't been half bad. In the last eight years, she's returned to acting with a renewed commitment, guest-starring on such well-known shows as "Law & Order" and "30 Rock.” She also appeared in the dark, satiric film, "In the Loop," and is now a series regular on HBO's "Veep," starring Julia-Louis-Dreyfus.
At the moment she's on hiatus and appearing Off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in David Adjmi's "3C," a sit-com-existentialist hybrid about three roommates unraveling in the shadow of the Vietnam War. It’s not an easy play, but that's precisely what appeals to the enthusiastic Chlumsky.
"There are send-up moments, but I don't want to turn it into a send-up," she says. "It's also Greek tragedy. You have to be game and brave. I connect to Connie's eagerness to learn and her openness, but her coping mechanism is alien. She detaches emotionally when things get too rough. I don't do that or wear her mask. That was challenging."
Not Referencing the Past
Raised in Broadview, Illinois, Chlumsky started out as a print model when she was ten months old. Not long after that, she appeared in commercials, and at the age of eight, started performing in professional dinner theater. “I was lumped into that catalogue of people who were sent to go-sees, theater and film auditions,” she says. “I got 'My Girl' through an open audition."
Clearly, that film was a major breakthrough, though nothing that followed quite equaled its success. Chlumsky landed gigs here and there, but like many child actors moving into adolescence, she found it increasingly difficult to get roles and along the way she lost interest, especially in college.
For starters, majoring in international studies at the University of Chicago was fully engrossing. She even toyed with the idea of a career as an ambassador and came close to taking the Foreign Service exam. But even more important, Chlumsky realized she had no craft to fall back on as an actor. "For kids it's not necessary," she says. "But that's not true when you are older. I didn't feel I knew how to act anymore. But, I knew how to write papers and do research. I liked the classes I was taking and found the walls of academia safe."
With degree in hand, she relocated to New York and held a variety of jobs—e.g. serving as fact checker on the Zagat restaurant surveys and editorial assistant on Harper Collins—which she enjoyed. But something was missing. "I took inventory and decided I wanted to go back to acting," she recalls. "One day I ran into a psychic on the street. She said to me, 'Are you the girl from ‘My Girl’?' She didn't have to be a psychic to know that. But then she said, 'You're not done yet. You still want to do this.' I gave her forty bucks for a ten minute palm-reading. She said what I needed to hear."
Chlumsky believes she was like anyone attempting to launch an acting career. "I needed to train and prepare," she says. And at the same time, she was fundamentally different because she had been a successful actor at one point. "My background may have made some people curious and possibly I was scrutinized more than someone else, but I didn't worry about it," she says. "That would have been a waste of my energy." Still, her past experience served her well on a personal level—from knowing how to handle rejection to recognizing the myths. "'You'll get the role if you lose ten pounds,'" she offers an example. "False!"
Following a summer intensive at the Atlantic Theater Company, Chlumsky started landing roles in Off-Off Broadway shows. Her ambition was to cut her acting teeth as an adult and create a new résumé without reference to the past. "Whatever the medium, I look for great writing and roles where I can stretch my range and craft," she says. Chlumsky savors several special turning point moments—from making enough money for medical insurance to landing a gig on "Law and Order" to earning her Equity card. "That was the biggest turning point," she says. "The work I've done since then continues that journey. I want to maintain a lovely balance of theater, film, and TV. That's the dance I'm pursuing. I want all of them cooking. I want to wrack up good plays and good indie films. A studio film would be nice."
"3C" runs through July 15 at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 224 Waverly, NYC. For tickets and more information, visit www.ticketcentral.com.
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