My Girl, how you've grown! ANNA'S SECOND ACT

The former child star explains why she took a break from the ‘trauma’ of acting to reinvent herself

If anyone loves a good true crime story, it’s Anna Chlumsky. So when the former child actress, who shot to fame in the early ’90s with the cute coming-of-age movie My Girl, saw the script for the Netflix series Inventing Anna, she would have walked over hot coals to get the part.

And for good reason. The show has been a big success with fans around the globe, captivated by the audacious true crimes of Anna Delvey (also known as Anna Sorokin), a con artist who posed as a German heiress in order to scam hundreds of thousands of dollars from New York’s elite.

In the nine-part series, Anna plays the role of an investigative journalist who, day-by-day, uncovers the startling details of Delvey’s life and crimes.

For the 41-year-old actress, playing such a pivotal role in a top-rating show is hardly new. For eight years, between 2012 and 2019, she starred as long-suffering political staffer Amy Brookheimer in the hit comedy Veep. But there was a time when it appeared her acting career was over before it had properly begun.

Anna, whose surname is pronounced Klumsky, was virtually born with a script in her hand.

Her mother signed her up with a talent agency as a baby, and at the age of just nine she landed the role of quirky and misunderstood tween Vada Sultenfuss, opposite Macaulay Culkin, in My Girl.

The movie was a huge hit when it was released in 1991, but while it might have seemed like Anna had “arrived” in Hollywood, she sees her early success as a kind of trauma. “Trauma isn’t just negative,” she explains. “You can see it as any event in which there was a ‘before’ and an ‘after’.” Finding fame was certainly that.