Unlike her fellow child star from Forrest Gump, the actress who played Young Jenny Curran is much easier to track down: Since appearing in the iconic film 20 years ago, Hanna Hall has played a handful of notable roles.
The Colorado native was cast to yell “Run, Forrest! Run!” when she was 9 years old. She quickly followed up with parts in a few TV movies before earning another recognizable role as Cecilia Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides.
After that 1999 movie, Hanna did another string of shorts and TV movies with some time off to graduate from high school in 2002 in Carbondale, Colorado. She then studied production at the Vancouver Film School and completed those courses in 2005.
In 2007, she appeared as Judith Myers in Halloween. As in Forrest Gump and Virgin Suicides, her character ultimately didn’t fare well.
“I definitely play a lot of people who either kill themselves or get killed or are abused in some way, which is funny because it couldn’t be further from my actual life,” she observed in a 2012 interview with Hollywood Chicago. “As an artist, you like to explore things that you might not experience in life but are interesting to you. We all have those aspects in our personality or our experience on some level.”
In terms of film production, Hanna had the busiest years of her career between 2007 and 2010 when she did some lesser-known horror movies and dramas. In 2012, she told Zap 2 It that she was putting acting on hold to focus on directing a “psychedelic absurdist comedy noir” show in California. Hanna also said it is rare for people to see her and immediately make the Forrest Gump connection.
“It’ll happen for a week, and then no one will say anything for a year. I just look a certain way that week that reminds them,” she said. “Mostly people just think I look familiar so it’s like, ‘Oh did I go to high school with you, or…?'”
These days, her Twitter account indicates she participates in traveling acts and regularly engages with fans. She turns 30 on July 9, just three days after the 20th anniversary of Forrest Gump.
