Before playing Ramona’s classmate Susan when she was 13, McCormick had made a number of appearances on TV (‘Til Death, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Supernatural, Hannah Montana, Monk), and competed on the hit game show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
After Ramona and Beezus, she starred on the Disney Channel teen sitcom A.N.T. Farm until 2014, and continued to do movies such as A Nanny for Christmas and numerous made-for-TV projects, such as the Lifetime Movie Who Stole My Daughter?
Her most recent film, the 1950s-set sci-fi mystery The Vast of Night, premiered at Slamdance in 2019 and has received stellar reviews since its debut on Amazon Prime in May.
“When we shot it, we had no idea, no clue that it was ever going to reach this many people,” McCormick, who plays Fay, a switchboard operator who’s listening to her best friend’s radio show when he starts picking up a strange frequency (while everyone else in their small town is at a high school basketball game), told KTLA 5 in May. “We knew that it was special, but the way movies work, the special ones don’t always get seen by a lot of people.”
And McCormick really lobbied director Andrew Patterson to play Fay. “I just hadn’t read anything like it before,” she told The Gate. “I was floored when I read it…But most of all, the character of Fay for actresses just doesn’t come along all that often.” Ultimately, a lot of her performance was inspired by her younger sister. “I had this template that I could start with, a visualization for Fay. That was really exciting,” she said.
So, “all of those things, sort of made me, when I finished reading the script, I said to myself, ‘I need to do everything in my power to make sure I get to be a part of this.'”