What Happened to Anna Chlumsky? Where She Is Now in 2026

If you were anywhere near a movie theater in 1991, you know the face. Anna Chlumsky was Vada Sultenfuss, the mortality-obsessed 11-year-old in My Girl whose grief over a boy named Thomas J. broke a generation of children in half. Then she made a couple more films, and then she simply stopped. No scandal, no cautionary tale. She got a degree, took an office job, and disappeared for the better part of a decade. Here is what actually happened, and what she is up to now.

01Profile

That education line is the one that always stops people. Plenty of former child stars talk about wanting a normal life. Chlumsky is one of the very few who went out and got a political science-adjacent degree from one of the most punishing universities in the country, and then took a job that involved checking whether restaurant listings were accurate.

02The Rise: How My Girl Made Her a Household Name

A Chicago kid with a working-class showbiz family

Chlumsky was born in Chicago in December 1980 to Nancy, who worked variously as a singer, an actress and a flight attendant, and Frank Chlumsky Jr., a chef and saxophonist. Her background is Czech and Croatian, which explains a surname that half of America still cannot spell. She got her first on-screen credit at eight, with a small part in John Hughes’ Uncle Buck (1989).

The film that defined a decade of childhood

Then came My Girl in 1991. As Vada Sultenfuss, a funeral director’s daughter convinced she is dying of every ailment she reads about, Chlumsky carried a studio comedy-drama opposite Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis and Macaulay Culkin. The film was a hit, and its central tragedy — Culkin’s Thomas J. dying from bee stings, and Vada’s devastated reaction at the funeral home — became one of the most widely shared traumas of the era.

The follow-ups, and the awkward math of growing up

She reprised the role in My Girl 2 (1994) and worked steadily through the middle of the decade in Trading Mom (1994) and Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain (1995). But the work thinned out as she moved through her teens — the familiar squeeze where a performer is no longer a child and not yet an adult. Speaking to People in February 2022, Chlumsky described a growing sense that the industry’s terms were not hers to accept.

03The Turning Point: Walking Away at 18

By 1999 she was done. Not on hiatus, not “taking meetings” — done. She retired from acting at 18 and enrolled at the University of Chicago, graduating in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in international studies. The decision, by her own account, was less a strategy than a sudden clarity.

I had this out-of-body moment where I realized, “I don’t have to do this anymore.” — Anna Chlumsky to People, February 2022

What followed was the part of the story that makes her unusual. She did not decamp to a beach or a wellness brand. She went to work. Chlumsky took a job as a fact-checker for the Zagat Survey and then worked as an editorial assistant at a HarperCollins science fiction and fantasy imprint in New York — regular jobs, regular commutes, regular paychecks, with a face that occasionally made coworkers do a double take.

1989Film debut at age eight with a small role in Uncle Buck.
1991My Girl opens and makes her one of the best-known child actors in America.
1994Returns as Vada in My Girl 2; also stars in Trading Mom.
1999Retires from acting at 18 and enrolls at the University of Chicago.
2002Graduates with a B.A. in international studies.
2003–2005Works as a Zagat fact-checker, then as an editorial assistant at a HarperCollins imprint.
2006Trains at the Atlantic Acting School in Manhattan and begins auditioning again.
2009Breaks back through with Armando Iannucci's political satire In the Loop.
2012Debuts as Amy Brookheimer on HBO's Veep.
2019Veep ends after seven seasons and six Emmy nominations for her.
2025Appears in Apple TV+'s Smoke and returns to the New York stage in Queens.
2026Cast opposite Leslie Bibb in the Icelandic Cold War series Top of the Rock.

04The Comeback: From a Desk Job to Veep

Here is the thing about the publishing job: she didn’t love it. What she did love, it turned out, was sitting in the audience.

“I was seeing a lot of Broadway, and I was inspired again,” she told People in that 2022 interview, describing the pull back toward performing as a chance to apply her creativity “but of my own decision making.” That last clause is the whole story. The child-star version of the job was something that happened to her. This version she chose.

She enrolled at the Atlantic Acting School in Manhattan, telling herself she would give it a year. By her account, the year-long trial collapsed almost immediately: “I’m not giving this a year. I freaking love it.”

Small parts, then Iannucci

The re-entry was not glamorous. She took indie roles — the low-budget horror comedy Blood Car (2007) among them — before Armando Iannucci cast her in In the Loop (2009), the profane British political satire that became her calling card. She was funny, precise and completely unrecognizable as Vada.

Amy Brookheimer and six Emmy nominations

When Iannucci built Veep for HBO, Chlumsky came with him. As Amy Brookheimer — Selina Meyer’s chief of staff, a woman running permanently at the redline — she landed six consecutive-era Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series between 2013 and 2019. She has never won one, which remains one of the more baffling gaps in recent Emmy history, but the run made her one of the most respected comic actors of her generation.

After Veep wrapped in 2019, she kept working across registers: the tech drama Halt and Catch Fire, the voice of Charlotte Pickles in the Rugrats revival (2021), and reporter Vivian Kent in Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix limited series Inventing Anna (2022), her first true leading role in a major series.

05What She Is Doing Now

A busy 2025 on screen and stage

Chlumsky had one of her fullest years in a while in 2025. She appeared in the action comedy Bride Hard, released that June, as Virginia, the sister-in-law who gets promoted to maid of honor over Rebel Wilson’s character. The same month, she turned up in Smoke, Dennis Lehane’s arson-investigation drama for Apple TV+ starring Taron Egerton and Jurnee Smollett, where she played Dawn Hudson across four episodes.

Then she went back to the theater, where she has quietly built a real second career. From October to December 2025 she played Agata in Queens, Pulitzer winner Martyna Majok’s immigrant drama, directed by Trip Cullman at Manhattan Theatre Club’s New York City Center stage. Reviewers singled out the role as a small, sharp-edged cameo — one critic described her playing Agata with “delicious irritation” — in a production that drew strong notices and extended its run.

Iceland, 1983, and a NATO base

In February 2026, Variety reported that Chlumsky had signed on opposite Leslie Bibb for Top of the Rock, a Cold War crime series from Iceland’s Truenorth alongside Mystery Productions and Vertu. Set in 1983, the six-episode show follows two American military police investigators stationed at the NATO base in Keflavík — Bibb as Captain Diane Goodman and Chlumsky as MP Sarah Ellis — after an American soldier turns up dead outside the base. Created by Davíð Óskar Ólafsson with Jón Atli Jónasson and co-creator Ragnar Jónsson, with Ólafsson directing all six episodes, the series is set to shoot in Iceland later this year.

One thing she will not do

If you have been holding out hope for a third My Girl, she has been unambiguous about it. Asked directly while promoting Smoke in June 2025, she shut the door.

I will never, ever do one. I will never be involved in that. I don’t need to do that. No. I played that character when I was ten years old. — Anna Chlumsky to Forbes, June 27, 2025

Away from the work, she is married to Shaun So, whom she met at the University of Chicago and wed in Brooklyn in 2008; the couple have two daughters. She returned to her alma mater as the university’s Class Day speaker in 2024 — the former fact-checker back on campus, addressing graduates about to face the same question she once answered by walking away.

06Summary

The reason Anna Chlumsky’s story lands differently from most child-star narratives is that nothing went wrong. She didn’t crash. She looked at a career that had chosen her at eight years old, decided at 18 that she was allowed to decline it, spent four years at a serious university and a couple more in an office, and then came back on her own terms — as a working actor with a technique, a theater résumé and six Emmy nominations.

Anna Chlumsky in 2026: Quick Facts

She is 45 and still acting full-time, splitting her work between screen and New York stage.
She retired at 18, earned a University of Chicago degree in 2002, and worked at Zagat and a HarperCollins imprint before returning.
Her comeback ran through Atlantic Acting School, In the Loop (2009) and seven seasons of Veep.
Six Emmy nominations for Veep; no win to date.
In 2025 she appeared in Apple TV+'s Smoke, the film Bride Hard, and Martyna Majok's Queens off-Broadway.
In February 2026 she was cast opposite Leslie Bibb in the Icelandic Cold War series Top of the Rock, filming in Iceland this year.
She has ruled out ever making a third My Girl film.

So no, she never really went anywhere — she just refused to spend her twenties being someone’s nostalgia. If Top of the Rock lands, the next wave of people discovering her won’t be thinking about My Girl at all. They’ll be watching an American MP on a windswept Icelandic runway and wondering where this actor has been. The answer, as ever with Chlumsky, is: working, on her own schedule.