Why did Drag Me to Hell star Alison Lohman disappear from Hollywood?

When I was a kid, I wanted to watch every Alison Lohman movie I could find. The actor may not be a household name, but throughout the 2000s, she starred in some of the most interesting films, often opposite more experienced stars like Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicolas Cage, and Ewan McGregor. Loman has always played characters younger than her, and I mentally rank her alongside other teen stars of the moment like AnnaSophia Robb and Keke Palmer — even though she was born in 1979.

At times, Lohman was portrayed as beautiful and angelic, but other times she played prickly characters, including troubled teenagers, child con artists, and, perhaps most famously, a promotion seeker who hates the “old hag.” The actress appeared in less than twenty films during her career, but most of them were convincing in some way. Then, around 2009, she largely disappeared from the spotlight. In the decade and a half since then, Lohman has only appeared in three additional roles. Where did you go? Fortunately, it’s not a mystery: she’s answered this question in a few interviews in recent years.

Lohman’s first screen credits came in 1998 when she appeared on the shows “7th Heaven” and “Pacific Blue,” as well as the amazing (or very bad, depending on your taste) monster-looking monster movie “Kraa The Sea Monster.” ” Over the next four years, Lohmann continued to appear in small roles and undercover titles until she finally gained fame when she played the tortured Astrid in the Warner Bros. film adaptation of “White Oleander.” According to The Hollywood ReporterLoman beat out nearly 400 other young actors to get the role, and the critical response to her star-making turn was fantastic. “Astrid is a very large and expansive role for a character with no prior distinguished experience, but Lohman takes it with great aplomb,” Robert Koehler of Variety He wrote at that time.

After White Oleander, Lohman told THR that she started getting offered roles without auditioning, and her agent even told her she was in the running for the role of Mary Jane in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. Over the next few years, she appeared in Tim Burton’s legendary “Big Fish,” Ridley Scott’s “Matchstick Men,” and an adaptation of the horse-girl classic “My Friend Flicka.” Lohman also lent her voice to the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” played an adult role opposite Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth in the thriller “Where the Truth Lies,” and appeared in a Robert Zemeckis film. The Uncanny Valley “Beowulf” as Ursula. Then, in 2009, Lohman capped off an incredible decade by starring in the gory sci-fi thriller “Gamer,” then finally working with Raimi in the even more outrageous horror film “Drag Me To Hell.”

By the end of the 2000s, Lohman had been working as an actress for more than a decade, and it’s clear from her 2022 conversation with THR that the wide range of productions she’s been a part of — some physically demanding, others mentally so — were taxing. Cumulative. She lived in a small town in Alaska during the filming of the Robin Williams-led black comedy “The Big White,” learned “to ride a horse, fall and get back up… the hard way” in “Flicka,” and performed extensive green exercises . Screen work for the film “Beowulf”. Lohman still speaks positively about all of these experiences, but she said that when she visited Wyoming while filming “Flicka,” she had already begun to think about moving from Los Angeles.

A career that began with an emotionally heavy role as a teen in foster care in “White Oleanders” ended with a harsher role in Raimi’s “Drag Me To Hell.” Loman told THR that although she adores Raimi, “this movie required a level of commitment that was much more than I thought it would be when I first started. It was very long hours.” By the end of production, she had contracted shingles, and her doctor gave her a wake-up call, saying: “Whatever you’re doing, you have to stop because you’re getting sick.” When she met her husband, Mark Neveldine, while filming “Gamer,” she said something that told her it changed the way she thought about her life: “He said, ‘You know, you don’t have to work. “You can take a break,” Fei recalled THR Retrospective. “No one has ever told me that before.”

In 2024 interview With IndieWireLohman revealed that she felt like she was “kind of manipulated by a lot of acting coaches who didn’t have the best intentions” when she started in the industry. This isn’t the first time she’s alluded to bad actors in Hollywood either. In her THR profile two years ago, she praised the creatives she worked with who had “no ego,” shouting out Burton, Raimi, and Robin Williams along the way. She similarly stated that Ridley Scott trusted his actors in Matchstick Men, saying, “That’s what a good director does.”

By contrast, Lohman’s description of her work in Where the Truth Lies, a non-noir film in which she plays a 1970s journalist who is manipulated by the men around her, is very clear. She described director Atom Eoghan as a “great director”, but said it was “one of the roles I probably wasn’t supposed to do”. She attributed the mistake to her lack of understanding of the character from the beginning, and said, “Even [Eyogan] I became a little insecure about my abilities, which caused it to kind of snowball. “I tried to save him and control him, but the more I did, the more he twisted.”

“Where the Truth Lies” is a very dirty movie, one that includes a scene in which Colin Firth’s character poisons Lohman’s female reporter and induces her to have sex with a woman in order to obtain blackmail material. The film’s poster clearly shows the faces of stars Bacon and Firth, while the only woman we see (which, left ambiguous, could be either Lohman or Rachel Blanchard’s Maureen) is shown naked from behind as she looks at the men. Reviews of the film were equally sexist. Referring to a scene in which a character is found dead,… San Francisco Chronicle Ruth Stein She wrote that Lohman was “so loud and annoying as Karen that you eventually wish she was the one floating in that tub.”

Again, Lohman didn’t seem to have any hard feelings about the film, but when asked what she gained from her time as an actress, she told THR, “I’m going to make sure that whatever movie I choose, the character really resonates with me somewhere. And that the director “He trusted me and trusted me in this role so they didn’t feel the need to control him.”

According to Loneman, she was never keen on the idea of ​​being very famous. She told IndieWire that she remembered being faced with a decision after “Drag Me To Hell” came out. “It was like: ‘Do you want to be a household name? I don’t think I really wanted to be in the public eye,'” she explained.

Speaking to THR, Lohman said she wasn’t a fan of the way she was treated when she was a famous face. “The part I like about anonymity is when you meet someone and they don’t know who you are, they’re very different toward you,” she told the outlet. “That’s what you miss as a famous actor because people treat you so differently and that’s true. You don’t really go through what normal people go through because it’s so spoiled and not real.” She clearly enjoys the anonymity of her post-acting life, saying: “If someone finds out that I was an actress before, in a weird way, that’s kind of a problem because they don’t see me anymore. The bubble burst and now I’m an actress, I just want to be.” I”.

Loman isn’t the first actor to turn away from Hollywood, in part because he wants less fame. Helen Hunt has made similar statements over the years, and it’s easy to see why the glare of lights can become harsh and artificial after prolonged exposure.

Lohman said that when she met Neveldine and he encouraged her to take a break if she needed to, she began brainstorming ideas about living on a farm. The couple then purchased a 200-acre farm in upstate New York and, according to IndieWire, were gifted two goats for their wedding. When they started having children, Lohman said she realized she wasn’t interested in juggling two separate worlds — acting and parenting. “Maybe I’m like a micromanager, but it’s hard for me to get in and out. It’s like two different lives,” she told IndieWire.

Since 2009, Lohman has appeared in only three films, including Neveldine’s The Vatican Tapes. She told THR that she received a lot of offers for work when her kids were too young to open, but after five years or so, those offers dried up. Loman said she misses acting sometimes, but she is currently studying it and hopes to create a better experience for the up-and-comers than the one she had with acting coaches. “I have a sound understanding of what it means to be an actress. I don’t have any other ego-driven approaches,” she told IndieWire last year. She also said that she would work with Raimi again in a heartbeat. “I would do anything with Sam,” she told THR, calling the horror legend a “creative genius” and “like a kid in a candy store.”

In what may be one of the most unexpected “Where Are They Now” segments ever, Lohman endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 election, Write on X (formerly Twitter) that she will vote Republican for the first time. “I feel like we can live in a safer, healthier country with @RobertKennedyJr and @realDonaldTrump,” she said in a post on voting day.