Veepended its run on HBO more than five years ago, but its satirical take on modern American politics feels as timely as ever.Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who earned multiple Primetime Emmy Awards for her showstopping performance as the show’s title character, has even said that her deliciously controversial charactershares traits with Donald Trump. Alongside the infamous Selina Meyer for virtually all seven seasons was her anxiety-stricken Chief of Staff Amy Brookheimer, played to perfection by Anna Chlumsky. Years after earning child-star status for her acclaimed turn inMy Girl(1991), Chlumsky proved she’s still a talent to watch with her Emmy-nominated performance onVeep— and it hasn’t stopped there.
In addition to leading the hit Netflix seriesInventing Anna(2022), Chlumsky can now be spotted in multiple standout episodes of the gritty new seriesSmokeon Apple TV+. MovieWeb recently caught up with Chlumsky while she was promotingSmoke, and she also weighed in on today’s political climate — as well as how Amy fromVeepmight react during certain standout press conferences held by high-profile political figures. “Ever since doing that show, I’ve had much more of a keen eye to whomever is on the side of whomever is talking,” she told MovieWeb. “It’s like, who are those people who, when that person says that, who’s on their phone, going, ‘Oh no! Why? What do we do? Was that the optics?’ Who’s putting out fires?”
Drawing a parallel to her fire-centric new series, Chlumsky continued, “When I learned that [Veep] role, that was the job: putting out fires… The chief of staff for [former U.S. Sen.] Barbara Boxer was my, like, point person. She was like, ‘Listen, I’m pretty much a fireman, and I’m pretty much just putting out fires. So I guess it wasn’t that huge of a leap [to mySmokecharacter].”
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“Heaps of Education”
From putting out fires on Veep to investigating criminally sparked fires onSmoke, Chlumsky continues to expand her repertoire on the performance front. Her gripping episodes in the series see her no-nonsense character, Dawn, investigating a serial arsonist alongside Emmy winner John Leguizamo. Chlumsky opened up to MovieWeb about how her experience onSmokewas enlightening in more ways than one:
“On a very basic, logical level, I quite honestly didn’t know that the ATF investigates arsonists. Like, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — oh, ‘firearms,’ OK. So, yeah, it literally was educational. And then, I got to dive into the job hierarchies of the ATF and discover what kind of path Dawn would have taken to get to where she is. There were heaps of education.”
There’s a good chance you’ll also learn a thing or two about fire investigations after watchingSmoke. The limited series is now streaming on Apple TV+.
