‘Drag Me to Hell’ Star Alison Lohman Opens Up About Her Decision to Trade Acting for a Life on the Farm
Esther Zuckerman
This article is part of IndieWire’s 2000s Week celebration. Click here for a whole lot more.
After Sam Raimi’s darkly playful 2009 fright fest “Drag Me to Hell” came out, star Alison Lohman said she faced a question. “It was kind of like: Do you want to be a household name?” she remembers in a recent phone call.
She didn’t. “I don’t think I really really wanted that, to be in the public eye,” she said.
If you had told film fans in the 2000s that Lohman would have essentially vanished from the big screen in 2024, they might have a hard time believing you. The decade offered Lohman an incredible run, starting with her breakout role in 2002’s “White Oleander,” Peter Kominsky’s melodrama, where she played the daughter of Michelle Pfeiffer. She played the love of Ewan McGregor’s life in Tim Burton’s “Big Fish,” and the sassy con artist in Ridley Scott’s “Matchstick Men.” She worked with Atom Egoyan and did a Miyazaki dub for “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.”
Lohman, with her blonde hair and round face, bears a resemblance to some of her peers — a fact that she has joked about online, comparing herself to Alison Pill and Erin Moriarty, the latter of whom is much younger. Still, she had a unique quality, an innocence that could turn on a dime.
But after “Drag Me to Hell” she largely retreated from acting. She got married to “Crank” director Mark Neveldine, who she met working on the action flick “Gamer.” Now they have three kids and recently moved to Arizona. She teaches online private acting classes, and is active on X, where she mostly reminisces about her best known roles with throwback photos with occasional interjections about topics like crypto. (“I think it’s definitely the future,” she said, noting that her brother and husband are really into it. “We can do our own thing with it. We can put our money into something that is not really controlled by the government.”)
Lohman is happy to wax nostalgic about her most productive decade, which she remembers as a “great time” for her. “I was just doing what I loved to do,” she said.
Before “White Oleander,” the adaptation of the Janet Fitch novel about a girl (Lohman) who is thrust into foster care after her mother (Pfeiffer) murders a boyfriend, Lohman had mostly worked in independent films, with a stint on the short-lived primetime soap “Pasadena.” She says she didn’t have a sense of how much the film, which also starred Robin Wright and Renée Zellweger, was going to change her life. “Then it was so easy to get roles after that,” she said. “I was like, ‘Wait, a second? Are you sure they want me for this role with Nicolas Cage? Do they understand I’m not really an actor yet?”
If Lohman had a speciality it was playing younger than her age. While she was already in her twenties when she became a recognizable name, she was frequently cast as teenagers or younger. Astrid in “White Oleander” is 12 when the movie begins. In “Matchstick Men” she’s supposed to be believably 14, and she was pushing 30 when she played a 16-year-old in the horse drama “Flicka” from 2006.
Famously, she convinced Scott she was the age of her skateboarding character during her audition for “Matchstick Men.” She thinks she might have even pulled out an old retainer for the gambit. At the end of the audition, Scott asked if her mom was going to pick her up. She thinks the casting director eventually told him the truth.
“I never really thought I looked that young, but I guess I did,” she said. “I don’t think of myself like that but other people did so I just kind of used it.”
Playing younger did start to feel restricting, particularly after “Flicka.” “At some point, I was like, ‘I know this is my schtick, I know I got roles that way, but I don’t want to do this anymore because it’s just not fair to the character,” she remembered.
Lohman only shares fond memories of her more famous co-stars. Zellweger filled her dressing room with novels upon learning she was studying at Santa Monica College while working on “White Oleander.” She “laughed the entire way through” “Matchstick Men,” where Scott gave her freedom to choose what marks to hit.
“Drag Me to Hell” was a moment of branching out for her, having never really been a huge horror fan. (The movies she cites as loving include skating romance “The Cutting Edge,” a childhood favorite, and “Dunkirk.”) To convince her to take the part of Christine Brown, the young bank loan officer who is cursed by a witch when she refuses to extend the old woman’s mortgage, Raimi walked her through the entire story, describing how she would react to all the jump scares. “It took about an hour or two,” she said. “The way told the story, he just had me laughing and then really upset at the end, like, ‘Oh my God, Sam, no no.'”
During the arduous shoot, which she says was like filming three movies in one, she was coated in maggots spewing from the mouth of a puppet, a clip that is currently making the rounds on X. They only did one take. She objected to the plot point where Christine murders her cat as a sacrifice, a protestation that only gave Raimi more motivation. “I said, ‘Sam, you are taking this too far, like now I don’t even want to be a part of this movie, because I love cats, I’m such a cat lover,'” she said. “The more I was saying that, the more he was like, ‘We’re going to kill your cat.'” (Spoiler alert: The cat dies.)
Lohman had met Neveldine before filming “Drag Me to Hell” on the set of “Gamer,” the Gerard Butler movie he co-directed with Brian Taylor. The now-married couple were friends for a bit before getting together. After the exhausting experience of Raimi’s film — “I actually got shingles after that movie” — her doctor recommended she take a break. She and Neveldine bought a farm in upstate New York and got married. They got two goats for their wedding. “We just lived this quiet life and then we had kids and that was it,” she said.
When people ask her why she didn’t continue acting she says she couldn’t find a way to raise kids — hers are now 13, 11, and 6 — and continue being in movies. “Maybe I’m like a micromanager,” she said, “but it’s hard for me to be going in and out. It’s like two different lives.”
She remains passionate about acting, and imparting what she learned through Act with Alison, where she pulls from various techniques, a la Meisner and Stanislavski, to find what’s right for her students. She wants to correct some of the experiences she had. “I just kind of got pulled around and manipulated by so many acting coaches who didn’t have good intentions,” she said. “I have a healthy understanding of what it means to be an actor. I don’t have any other ego-driven ways.”
Lohman’s last credited role was as Sister Blister in her husband’s 2016 film “Officer Downe.” If she did return to acting herself it would have to be the right project, perhaps something she creates herself. Right after she decided to leave the business she would get offers, but these days people from Hollywood aren’t really reaching out anymore. “I don’t blame them,” she said. “It was so long ago. I imagine people totally forgot about me.”
