Every so often, forums and social media are flooded with questions about one particular child star who seemed to have disappeared from the limelight. Where is the girl from American Beauty, Patriot Games, Hocus Pocus, and The Hole? Well, Thora Birch has actually been around. She never left. Check her IMDB page, and you’ll see that she’s had roles in plenty of movies and shows in the last few years, including The Walking Dead and The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
If you were alive in the ’90s, Thora Birch was pretty much everywhere on TV. She appeared in commercials, sitcoms, family movies and even music videos. She played Dani Dennison in Hocus Pocus in 1993, an eight-year-old who outsmarted three witches before bedtime. By 1999, she was 17 and starring in American Beauty, a film that cleaned up at the Oscars.
But Birch refused to play the Hollywood game. She told The Guardian years later, “I just felt like I was making people angry, because I wouldn’t wear the frilly bows.” She added, “I just didn’t take advice and I think people got pissed off at me for not taking advice.” Hollywood noticed, but work didn’t stop. “I was always working, it’s just that no one was paying attention.”
In May 2025, Birch, now 43 years old, stepped onto the Cannes red carpet for The Chronology of Water, standing alongside Kristen Stewart, who directed and stars in the film. The film adapts Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir about trauma, survival, and finding freedom through writing.
So, yes, Thora Birch has kept busy. She had a role in The Midway Point in 2024. A turn in AMC’s Mayfair Witches in 2025 as Gifford Mayfair, a wealthy outsider desperate to belong to something supernatural and dangerous. Decades after nearly landing Interview with the Vampire at age 12, she finally gets to step into Anne Rice territory.
Birch even moved behind the camera, directing The Gabby Petito Story in 2022, with more projects lined up. Comedy, drama, directing, acting. She doesn’t lock herself into lanes. “I try not to make a big plan,” she told People.
Thora Birch is 43 now, but you can still spot the 18-year-old Enid from Ghost World in the eye roll and the sigh. She’ll sprint toward an unvarnished truth, then backpedal when you poke it. What does growing up on set do to your filter? She admits teen her was worse: “It was hard to leave Enid behind for a while,” she says from Los Angeles, stopping mid-thought at “I found the results of that to be personally…” Fame hit early.
At 11 she’s on the Monkey Trouble poster beside a monkey in a baseball cap. She laughs at herself: “a young and borderline egotistical actor who was overly confident about her own abilities”. By the late Nineties work dried up, and she cringes: “Um, I’m actually still a virgin, so…” Months filming Paradise or Jack Ryan thrillers, then school, then the road again. “But it has a heavy price.”
You didn’t lose track of Thora Birch. You just stopped looking for her. Now, you’ve found her. And she’s still the beautiful, confident and amazing actress she always was.
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