Like so many precocious youngsters who hit it out of the park when they’re 7, Chloe Greenfield—who made her acting debut in 8 Mile playing Jimmy’s little sister, Lily, basically the one person who doesn’t piss him off at some point—eventually put the profession on the back burner.
“I never really set out to be an actor,” the Twitter-described herbalist and activist said on the Dec. 13, 2020, episode of the podcast Setting the Tone. “I was born and raised in Southfield, a suburb outside of Detroit, and by chance one of my family members heard about an open casting call on the radio and we just happened to take our whole family down there. Detroit, in 2000, having any kind of filming was uncommon at that time, so it was like an event.”
Greenfield estimated there were a couple hundred other kids there, taking Polaroids while grown-ups filled out the paperwork. “Right when we were about to leave,” she recalled, “a production assistant came up to us and asked my mom if she could do a screen test on me…And pretty soon after that we were filming 8 Mile. So that was my first audition ever, which wasn’t really an audition.”
For the next few years her family went back and forth to L.A. for pilot season and auditioned for but didn’t get parts in films such as Cheaper by the Dozen. But when she was 11 she did score a guest-starring appearance on ER, which turned into a three-season run playing Sarah, the adoptive daughter of John Stamos‘ Dr. Tony Gates, from 2006 to 2009, after which she moved on to other pursuits, starting with high school and then college.
“I got the chance to be a stupid kid and make my mistakes, and grow up and not be in the public eye,” she reflected on Setting the Tone, noting that she was open to future acting opportunities and still went on auditions here and there. “For my overall life, that was fantastic.”