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 being made, often opposite more experienced stars like Michelle Pfieffer, Nicolas Cage, and Ewan McGregor. Lohman always played characters younger than herself, and I mentally categorized her alongside other teen stars of the moment like AnnaSophia Robb and Keke Palmer — even though she was born in 1979.

Sometimes, Lohman was cast as a cherubic beauty, but other times she played thornier characters, including troubled teens, child con artists, and, perhaps most famously, a “hag”-hating promotion-seeker. The actor had appeared in fewer than two dozen movies in her career, yet the majority of them were compelling in some way. Then, around 2009, she largely disappeared from the spotlight. In the decade and a half since, Lohman has only popped up in three additional roles. Where did she go? Luckily, it’s not a mystery: she’s answered the question in a handful of interviews in recent years.

Lohman’s first on-screen credits came in 1998 when she appeared on the shows “7th Heaven” and “Pacific Blue,” as well as the incredible (or incredibly bad, depending on your tastes)-looking monster movie “Kraa The Sea Monster.” Over the next four years, Lohman continued showing up in small roles and under-the-radar titles until she finally gained recognition playing the tortured Astrid in Warner Bros’ adaptation of “White Oleander.” According to The Hollywood Reporter, Lohman beat out nearly 400 other young actors to get the part, and the critical response to her star-making role was great. “Astrid is a tremendously weighty and extended role for a thesp with no prior feature experience, but Lohman takes it on with great confidence,” Variety’s Robert Koehler wrote at the time.

After “White Oleander,” Lohman told THR she started getting roles offered to her sans audition, and her agent even told her she was in the running for the Mary Jane role in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man.” Over the next few years, she appeared in the Tim Burton fable “Big Fish,” Ridley Scott’s “Matchstick Men,” and a loose 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 a very adult role opposite Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth in the thriller “Where the Truth Lies,” and popped up in Robert Zemeckis’ uncanny valley “Beowulf” as Ursula. Then, in 2009, Lohman capped off an incredible decade by starring in the gory sci-fi flick “Gamer” and finally working with Raimi on the even grosser horror hit “Drag Me To Hell.”

By the end of the aughts, Lohman had been working as an actor for over a decade, and it’s clear from her 2022 conversation with THR that the wide range of productions she had been a part of — some of them physically demanding, and others mentally so — were cumulatively taxing. She lived in small-town Alaska for the Robin Williams-led dark comedy “The Big White,” learned “to ride a horse, fall off and get back up … the hard way” on “Flicka,” and did extensive green screen work for “Beowulf.” Lohman still spoke positively about all of these experiences, but said that when she visited Wyoming during the “Flicka” shoot, she had already started considering a move out of Los Angeles.

The career that kicked off with an emotionally heavy role as a teen in foster care in “White Oleanders” ended with an even more grueling part in Raimi’s “Drag Me To Hell.” Lohman told THR that though she adores Raimi, “that movie required a level of commitment that was way more than what I thought it would be when I first started. It was long, long, long hours.” By the end of production, she had developed shingles, and her doctor gave her a wake up call, saying: “Whatever you’re doing, you need to stop because you’re getting sick.” When she met her husband Mark Neveldine while making “Gamer,” she said something he told her changed the way she thought about her life: “He said, ‘You know, you don’t have to work. You can take a break,'” she recalled in the THR retrospective. “No one had ever said that to me.”

In a 2024 interview with IndieWire, Lohman revealed that she felt she “just kind of got pulled around and manipulated by so many acting coaches who didn’t have good intentions” when she was starting out in the industry. It’s not the first time she’s alluded to bad actors in Hollywood, either. In her THR profile from two years earlier, she complimented the creatives she’s worked with who don’t have any “ego,” shouting out Burton, Raimi, and Robin Williams along the way. She similarly mentioned that Ridley Scott trusted his actors on “Matchstick Men,” stating, “That’s what a good director does.”

In contrast, Lohman’s description of her work on “Where the Truth Lies,” an unrated noir-ish movie in which she plays a journalist in the ’70s who is manipulated by the men around her, is pretty telling. She called filmmaker Atom Eyogan “a great director,” but said that it “was one of the roles I probably shouldn’t have done.” She chalked the mistake up to her lack of understanding of the character from the beginning, and said that “even [Eyogan] got a little insecure with my abilities and that caused it to kind of snowball. He tried to save it and control it but the more you do that, the more it gets twisted.”

“Where the Truth Lies” is a pretty sordid movie, one that includes a scene where Colin Firth’s character gets Lohman’s reporter intoxicated and talks her into having sex with a woman to gain blackmail material. The film’s poster tellingly features the faces of stars Bacon and Firth, while the only woman we see (who, left ambiguous, could be either Lohman or Rachel Blanchard’s Maureen) is shown naked from behind as she looks up at the men. The reviews of the film were equally sexist; referencing a scene in which a character is found dead, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ruthe Stein wrote that Lohman was “so shrill and annoying as Karen that you end up wishing she were the one floating in that tub.”

Again, Lohman seemed to have no hard feelings about the film, but when asked about her takeaways from her time as an actor, she told THR, “I would make sure that whatever film I choose, that the character really resonated within me somewhere. And that the director had the confidence in me and trusted me with that role so that they wouldn’t feel the need to control it.”

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

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

Lohman is far from the first actor to step away from Hollywood in part due to a wish for less fame; Helen Hunt has made similar statements over the years, and it’s easy to see why the glow of the spotlight can begin to feel harsh and artificial after prolonged exposure.

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

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

In what might be one of the most unexpected “where are they now” codas ever, Lohman endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 election, writing on X (formerly Twitter) that she would be voting Republican for the first time. “i feel like we can live in a safer and healthier country with @RobertKennedyJr and @realDonaldTrump,” she said in a voting day post.