Someone in Hollywood once told actress Anna Chlumsky, who played 11-year-old hypochondriac Vada Sultenfuss in My Girl, that she was “too fat or too ugly.” Yes, that aged badly, especially when you consider that she’s been nominated for six Emmy awards since then. At 45, the former child star has grown up and dismantled every bad take the industry had about her.
Nobody could forget My Girl‘s Vada. At such a young age, Chlumsky showed acting ability beyond her age. The funeral scene where Vada stands over her best friend’s casket still hits today. You can’t watch it without having a lump in your throat.
But Chlumsky, who took a break from acting for a while to focus on school and took publishing jobs at Zagat and HarperCollins, isn’t that young star anymore. She’s grown, and so has her talent. But when she tried to get back into the industry, she was met with a lot of rejection.
But after she trained at Atlantic Acting School in 2005, she started auditioning again, and eventually landed Amy Brookheimer, the character that turned her career the right way up again.
My Girl is probably still her most famous role to date, of course. And all these years, people still remind her of how good she was as Vada, including Jamie Lee Curtis, who played the love interest to Dan Aykroyd’s character in the movie and recently rewatched the film. “This is emotional for me because they were so young,” Curtis told Entertainment Tonight. “Watching young actors do an adult’s job, it’s very challenging. It’s hard for me. It’s hard to wrestle with that.” Curtis had nothing but praise for Chlumsky, of course.
But it’s been a long journey to success. Chlumsky followed up Veep with Vivian Kent in Inventing Anna and showed up last year in Smoke on Apple TV+, where she worked alongside John Leguizamo.
When Forbes recently asked her about a My Girl 3 reunion, however, she gave one of the more definitive answers in recent celebrity interview history. “I will never, ever do one,” she said. Leguizamo, who sat alongside in the interview, laughed her answer off, however. “That’s so definitive. You never say never in this business,” he said.
And maybe he’s right. With the right script and the right director, anything is possible.
Chlumsky has signed on for Top of the Rock in 2026. It’s a Cold War crime series from Iceland’s Truenorth, set in 1983 at the NATO base in Keflavík. She’ll play MP Sarah Ellis opposite Leslie Bibb’s Captain Diane Goodman, with the two investigating the death of an American soldier while espionage and political pressure close in from every direction. Director Ólafsson was direct about why he wanted her for the role. “Anna Chlumsky’s ability to switch between genres is like no other, and she absolutely embodies every character she’s played across her phenomenal career. We’re beyond ecstatic to round out the leads in Top of the Rock with two of the most brilliant actors,” he said.
Back at home, Chlumsky and her husband, Shaun So, have two daughters, Clara, born in 2013, and Penelope, born in 2016. But, having learnt from her experience on My Girl, she’s not pushing them into the industry. Her rule is that they have to wait until 18. And, honestly, given what she went through as a child star, that rule makes complete sense.
Looking at her today, it’s hard to believe anyone would call Anna Chlumsky ‘too fat or too ugly.’ Six Emmy nominations, two critically acclaimed dramas, and a Cold War spy series later, it turns out the only thing wrong with that assessment was… everything.
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