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

Sometimes, Lohman was cast as a cherubic beauty, but other times she played more difficult characters, including troubled teenagers, childish con artists and, perhaps most famously, a promotion-hating slob. The actress appeared in less than two dozen films in her career, but most of them were attractive in some way. Then, around 2009, she largely disappeared from the limelight. In the decade and a half since, Lohmann has appeared in only three additional roles. Where did she go? Fortunately, it's no mystery: she's answered the question in several interviews over the years.

Lohman's first screen credits came in 1998 when she appeared in the TV series 7th Heaven and Pacific Blue, as well as the amazing (or incredibly bad, depending on your taste) monster movie Kraa The Sea Monster". Over the next four years, Lohmann continued to appear in small roles and under-the-radar titles until she finally gained recognition playing the tormented Astrid in Warner Bros.' adaptation of The White Oleander. According to The Hollywood ReporterLohmann beat out nearly 400 other young actors to win the role, and the critical response to her star-making role has been stellar. "Astrid is an incredibly difficult and expansive role for someone with no previous experience, but Lohmann takes it on with aplomb," Variety's Robert Keller. wrote at the time.

After "The White Oleander," Lohmann told THR that she started getting offered roles without auditioning, and her agent even said 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 fable "The Big Fish", Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men and a loose adaptation of Horse Girl's classic My Friend Flicka. Lohman also lent his voice to Hayao Miyazaki's English dub Nausicaa 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 appeared in Robert Zemeckis' Uncanny Valley Beowulf as Ursula. Then, in 2009, Lohmann capped off an incredible decade starring in the outrageous sci-fi film Gamer and finally working with Raimi on the even grittier horror hit Drag Me To Hell.

By the end of things, Lohmann had been working as an actor for more than a decade, and it's clear from her 2022 chat with THR that the wide range of productions she's been a part of—some of them physically demanding, others mentally—was cumulatively taxing. She lived in small-town Alaska for the Robin Williams-led dark comedy The Great White, learned to "ride a horse, fall and get back up ... the hard way" on Flicka, and dabbled in green. screen work for "Beowulf." Loman still spoke positively about all of these experiences, but said that when she visited Wyoming during the filming of Flicka, she already started thinking about moving from Los Angeles.

A career that began with an emotionally difficult role as a teenager in foster care in "White Oleanders" ended with an even more grueling part in Raimi's "Drag Me to Hell." Lohmann told THR that while he adores Raimi, “that movie required a level of commitment that was way more than I thought it would be when I first started. It was long, long, long hours." By the end of production, she 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 filming Gamer, she said something he said to her changed the way she thought about life: "He said, 'You know, you don't have to work. You can rest. ", she recalled the THR retrospective. "No one ever told me that."

In an interview from 2024 with IndieWireLohman revealed that she felt she was "just kind of drawn in 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 alludes to bad actors in Hollywood. In her THR profile from two years earlier, she complimented the creatives she's worked with who don't have any "egos," calling out Burton, Raimi, and Robin Williams along the way. She similarly mentioned that Ridley Scott trusted his actors in Matchstick Men, stating, "That's what makes him a good director."

By contrast, Lohmann's description of her work on Where the Truth Lies, an underrated film noir in which she plays a journalist in the '70s who is manipulated by the men around her, is quite telling. She called director Atom Eoghan "a great director" but said "it was one of the roles I probably shouldn't have done". She chalked the mistake up to her misunderstanding of the character from the start and said that "even (Eoghan) became a little unsure of my abilities and it kind of snowballed because of that. He tried to save her and control her, but the more you do it, the more it twists.'

Where the Truth Lies is a pretty nasty movie, including a scene where Colin Firth's character gets Lohmann's reporter drunk and talks her into having sex with a woman to get blackmail material. The film's poster tellingly shows the faces of stars Bacon and Firth, while the only woman we see (who, left ambiguous, could be either Loman or Rachel Blanchard's Maureen) is shown naked from behind looking up at the men. Reviews of the film were equally sexist; reference to a scene in which the character is found dead, the Ruth Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Lohmann was "so shrill and annoying as Karen that you end up wishing she was floating in that bathtub."

Again, Lohmann didn't seem to have hard feelings about the film, but when asked about her moments as an actor, 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 trusted me and entrusted me with that role so they didn't feel the need to control her."

According to Lonman, she was never too keen on the idea of ​​being mega-famous. She told IndieWire that she remembers being faced with a decision after Drag Me To Hell came out. "It was something like: Do you want to be a household name? I think I really, really didn't want that, to be in the public eye," she explained.

Speaking to THR, Lohmann said she wasn't treated the way she was when she was a celebrity. "The part I like about anonymity is when you meet someone and they don't know who you are, they're so different to you," she told the producer. “That's what you miss as a famous actor because people treat you so differently and it's true. You don't really go through what normal people go through because it's so over the top and unrealistic." She clearly enjoys the anonymity of post-acting life, saying: “If someone finds out that I used to be an actress, in a weird way, it's kind of awkward because they don't see me anymore. The bubble burst and I am now an actress, I just want to be me.

Lohmann is far from the first actor to walk away from Hollywood in part because of a desire for less fame; Helen Hunt has made similar statements over the yearsand it's easy to see why spotlight shine can start to feel harsh and artificial after extended exposure.

Lohmann said that when she met Neveldin and he encouraged her to take a break if she needed to, she started thinking about ideas related to living on a farm. The couple then bought a 200-acre farm in upstate New York, and according to IndieWire, two goats were given as a wedding present. When they started having children, Lohmann said she realized she didn't really want to juggle the two separate worlds of 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.

As of 2009, Lohmann has only appeared in three films, including Neveldine's The Vatican Tapes. She told THR that she got a lot of offers to work when her kids were too young to be open to it, but after five or so years, they dried up. Lohman said she sometimes misses acting, but she's currently learning it and hopes to create a better experience for up-and-comers than what she had with acting coaches. "I have a healthy understanding of what it means to be an actor. I have no other ego-driven ways,” she told IndieWire last year. She also said she would 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 may be one of the most unexpected "where are they now" codes ever, Lohmann has endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 election. writing to X (formerly Twitter) that he will be voting Republican for the first time. "I feel like we could live in a safer and healthier country with @RobertKennedyJr and @realDonaldTrump," she said in a post on voting day.