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Jamie Lee Curtis cherishes the time she spent with child actors Macaulay Culkin and Anna Chlumsky making My Girl.
Curtis, 67, looked back on her career in a Nov. 25 interview with Entertainment Tonight. The outlet played old footage from the making of the 1991 film. It starred Chlumsky, now 44, as Vada Sultenfuss, an 11-year-old girl in the summer of 1972 who was a hypochondriac and obsessed with death. It was her first major film role. Culkin, now 45, played her friend Thomas, who died from an allergic reaction to bee stings. Dan Aykroyd played her father, while Curtis played her father’s girlfriend (and Vada’s future stepmother).
“Oh, so sweet,” Curtis said as she watched the old footage. In the clip, Curtis said she had a “terrible mouth” she was trying to curb. “From the first day, I said to them, okay, look I swear a lot. $5 for every time I say the s-word. I’ve lost a lot of money already,” she said.
“This is emotional for me because they were so young,” Curtis said in the present, watching the old footage. “. . . I loved My Girl. That was another beautiful, unexpected, beautiful little bit of work and a wonderful character that I got to play.”
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But she said that there was something difficult about watching two young actors play out such intense scenes. “Watching young actors do an adult’s job, it’s very challenging,” she said. “It’s hard for me. It’s hard to wrestle with that.”
She continued, “I’ve played a lot of moms, worked with a lot of young actors, and Macaulay and Anna were so great.”
My Girl was a box office success, making over $120 million. It also received a sequel, 1994’s My Girl 2, which saw Chlumsky, Curtis and Aykroyd reprise their roles.
Back in 1991, Culkin, who had found fame in 1990’s Home Alone, told PEOPLE that he was glad in My Girl to “have a partner” in Chlumsky. He reported, “She’s fun to work with because she’s a kid, and kids relate to kids better than they relate to adults.”
Looking back at My Girl in 2022, Chlumsky told PEOPLE, “We didn’t know how to put into words what we were doing back then. It took until I was in my 20s for me to realize it had such resonance. People would say, ‘My best friend died, and I don’t know what I would have done without that movie.’”
Of the film’s effect on her own life, she said, “We’ve all got something that shaped us, and this is mine.”
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Still, she said being a child star wasn’t easy. “People made fun of me or they’d say disparaging things,” she said. “Now we’re learning so much more about what it is to be a child in show business. You’re just hoping to please the adults as much as you can.”
As she grew from child to teen, she said, “I wasn’t getting jobs, I wasn’t getting booked, I was told I was too fat or too ugly. You’re living on a risk-reward system, and that can be extremely damaging. It was an uphill battle to believe in myself at all. But I knew I was intelligent, and I knew I wanted to get my education.”
“As a kid, you’re just along for the ride, but it can be extremely damaging. [In college] I had this out-of-body moment where I realized, ‘I don’t have to do this anymore,’ ” she said. She ultimately gave up her career from 1999 to 2005.
“I was kind of in a prelife crisis, staying out too much and all that,” she said. But living in New York, she still felt called toward acting. “I got to a point where I was extremely inspired again. I wanted to communicate a text. I wanted to do an art.” She enrolled at Atlantic Acting School and began auditioning again.
Chlumsky is a six-time Emmy nominee for her role as Amy Brookheimer on the HBO television series Veep, which ran from 2012 to 2019. She’s also starred in TV series like Halt and Catch Fire, Inventing Anna and Smoke.
