Editor’s note, May 25, 2024: On Thursday, the University announced that Anna Chlumsky was unable to travel to Chicago for Class Day due to an “unforeseen change in her production schedule.” IOP Director and former U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp will speak instead.
On March 19, actor Anna Chlumsky was announced the speaker for the University of Chicago’s 2024 Class Day ceremony, held during convocation weekend on Friday, May 31.
Best known for her role as Amy Brookheimer in the HBO comedy series Veep, Chlumsky was a child actor before attending UChicago and graduating in 2002. She took a hiatus from acting after graduation and moved to New York City, first working as a fact-checker for restaurant-rating organization Zagat and then as an editorial assistant for publishing company HarperCollins. She returned to the screen in a 2007 episode of Law & Order, and along with Veep, Chlumsky has continued acting post-UChicago in projects such as Armando Iannucci’s movie In The Loop and the Netflix miniseries Inventing Anna.
Chlumsky sat down with the Maroon to talk about the unique path she took to the University of Chicago, how gaining fame as a child actor affected her career, and her favorite spots on campus as a student.
“I was honored and very surprised,” Chlumsky said about receiving an invitation to speak at Class Day. “You don’t go around each day thinking that you’re qualified to speak to a group of accomplished strangers about anything.”
Originally from Chicago, Chlumsky grew up in the Proviso Township area. She had had roles in television and movies for almost ten years as a child actor, but when she paused her acting career to attend UChicago, she found that her on-screen success had an unwanted side effect—attention.
“Attention, no matter what, was unwanted. It’s one of those things that makes a professional childhood not recommended. No matter what, it was always surprising—and not surprising at the same time—to have people anticipate my appearance on campus,” she said. “But I was totally excited to come to school because, number one, I’m just totally excited to be out of my mom’s house and embarking on a life of my own, and number two, I got to do things that had nothing to do with that profession that I had known my whole life. I got to write essays and I got to be graded on my own merits. It was fantastic.”
Chlumsky graduated from UChicago in 2002 with a degree in International Studies. She named John Mearsheimer, her thesis advisor, as one of her favorite professors and remembers spending time at a few special locations on campus, like Pick Hall and Cobb Café.
Her go-to order at Cobb Café? “A blueberry Pop Tart and a cup of milk. That was my life during my first year,” Chlumsky said.
It was during her time at UChicago when Chlumsky decided she wanted to quit acting and pursue a career in government, a decision that she would go back on years later.
“When I was at school, I thought I was actually going to apply [to work] for the State Department. I got the [Foreign Service Officer Test] exam study packet and I looked at it and it just sucked my soul. It was probably my first existential crisis moment, because I really thought that was what I was gonna do,” she said.
“Fast forward, I’m in New York for a variety of reasons and I decide that I do want to be an actor, but with a craft and for all the right reasons. Kind of like how a U of C student would have approached it, as opposed to being forced into it,” Chlumsky said. “So I pursued that. I went to the Atlantic [Acting School] and they had a very U of C application in that they had you not write about acting. And then I’m acting again and doing theater.”
Chlumsky mentioned Armando Iannucci’s movie In the Loop as a project she particularly connected with based on her studies at UChicago and her career goals while in college. In the movie, Chlumsky plays Liza Weld, an aide to the US Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomacy.
“When I got [to the cold read], I saw that [my character] was this chick from the State Department writing a paper and I’m just like—I got this. This is great. This is my alt[ernate] life. And so much of it was about the threat environment in the State Department, which was legitimately what my thesis was about—the threat environment in the world and how it affects policy. So it was a major ‘let go and go with what you already know’ moment.”
Chlumsky commented that her time playing government figures on television coupled with her time studying international relations and government at the University of Chicago have made an impact on her view of both government and the people behind it.
“In The Loop was all about satire and how ridiculous it is that human beings are making all these decisions for people, and that the human beings are extremely flawed and that’s fine,” she said. “And to this day, this is a huge problem with the world right now, the concept that there’s gods and monsters that we vote for. I mean, what are we doing? We used to think that there was a divine right to royalty, and then we were like, ‘screw that’, and enlightenment happened, and then here we are again! Like, ‘Oh, this person I’m voting for can do no wrong.’ That was exactly the type of story [In The Loop] was telling—stop pretending that this is somehow a comic book and there’s good and evil, because it’s really these assholes who just got out of college.
“And that’s where Veep came from—Armando Iannucci wrote Veep as well. And it was kind of my stance, and it’s still always my stance, that we’re not in a democracy to figure out what happens after death. There’s a separation of church and state, and we’re not doing fantasy here. It’s actually real life. That’s definitely a stance I always had at school and that I developed even more once I got out of school.”
And in terms of what she wants to impart on the audience on Class Day, Chlumsky mentioned two ideas. One was about finding your way as an individual post-college.
“In school, we all come from this world of, ‘If I work hard and I figure it out then I’ll get the A, or if I don’t get an A I’ll talk to the professor,’” she said. “There’s this system in academia that, once you crack the code, it feels somewhat reliable. And I think what gets scary for people is that the world outside of academia isn’t necessarily as systemic as that, and that can be very scary. So the only thing you can do is offer up what you can do. If you’re doing a job interview, or if you’re like me in my profession doing 100 job interviews a year because we’re always auditioning, you can’t get in the brain of the person. You can’t do it. And if you try, you’re not presenting yourself, you’re presenting this bullshit idea that you have of what they want. And maybe it’ll hit the mark, but not at a reliable pace. So you just have to do you.”
Chlumsky also said she hoped to impart on the audience that, while it’s easy to trade self-care for more hours spent studying and working as a college student, that mindset can end up doing more harm than good.
“I really want to make sure that by the end of my little speech, people know that it’s really important to just brush your teeth,” Chlumsky said. “There’s that virtue to cramming that we all come out of school with, but truly just make sure that your rent is paid and that you’re getting sleep and that you’re getting your square meals.”
