10 Things I Hate About You and The Secret World of Alex Mack made Larisa Oleynik a true icon of the 1990s.
At age 12, Oleynik won the leading role on Nickelodeon sitcom Alex Mack after competing against more than 400 other aspiring young actresses in an open casting call. The series ran for 78 episodes between 1994 and 1998, establishing Oleynik a teen idol in the process. She parlayed her Nickelodeon fame into leading roles in Hollywood blockbusters like The Baby-Sitters Club and 10 Things I Hate About You by the late 1990s.
Oleynik has mostly maintained privacy around her romantic life, though she did date 10 Things costar Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the late 1990s. She told Morbidly Beautiful in 2019 that she realized at an early age that it was important to keep her personal life away from the public.
“I was 12 when I started doing Alex Mack. It was challenging for me, and when I started getting recognized and stuff it was very confusing,” she remembered. “I was shuttling back and forth to my real life living in northern California. We’d travel to southern California to film and then go back to northern California to be in school.”
She continued, “I was trying to maintain some sense of normalcy, whatever a normal childhood even means. But it would get confusing sometimes when I’d be hanging out with my friends and someone would recognize me. I was very self conscious about it.”
“As I’ve grown up, I think this is something I’m still trying to figure out, trying to take on a public persona but also be able to leave it as I need to,” Oleynik noted.
Oleynik took a break from her acting career at the height of her 1990s fame to enroll in New York’s Sarah Lawrence College. She referred to her self-imposed acting hiatus as “the best decision” she’d ever made in a 2006 interview.
“I knew that I wanted to go to school and I wanted to go for four years, and in New York,” she said. “My favorite [classes] were the writing workshops. I took poetry classes, and courses in playwright and screenwriting. They were very comforting and productive. Everyone was respectful of each other. No one claimed to know everything.”
In a 2024 New York Times profile, Oleynik said she was partially inspired to attend Sarah Lawrence College because it was the same school her costar Julia Stiles’ character Kat chose in 10 Things I Hate About You.
Oleynik revisited 10 Things I Hate About You when she reunited with costar and onscreen sister Stiles at the New York City premiere of Stiles’ feature directorial debut Wish You Were Here in January 2025. Stiles told People earlier in the night that she was looking forward to catching up with Oleynik.
“I know that Larisa Oleynik is gonna be here tonight, which will be wonderful to see her,” she said. “We kind of, you know, the way that it’s hard to keep in touch with people but [we talk] over text messages.”
Oleynik told The New York Times in 2024 that she really did feel a sisterly bond with Stiles while they were filming 10 Things I Hate About You. She remembered wanting her costar’s attention and approval on set because Stiles was a “a cool, downtown New Yorker” who seemed “so much more mature,” even though they were only a few months apart in age.
In January 2024, Oleynik revisited another longtime friendship she shared with Rider Strong, which began when they starred in the national touring company of Les Miserables as children. Strong referred Oleynik to her first-ever acting agent and sparks flew a few years later when she guest starred on his sitcom Boy Meets World.
“[Rider] was my first kiss, like, ever. That’s why there was so much tongue!” Oleynik shared on Strong’s “Pod Meets World” podcast. “All I remember of that entire experience, of the first episode at least, it was [filmed] between the first and second episode of [The Secret World of] Alex Mack. I was a very young, 14 or 15 years old, and I was a very late bloomer. When things sped up, they really sped up. But at that point, I was a kid.”
Oleynik continues to act while living a somewhat quieter life in Venice, California. She had a recurring role on Mad Men as ad executive Ken Cosgrove’s girlfriend Cynthia Baxter and returned to Nickelodeon to voice the witch Icy in the animated revival of Winx Club.
Oleynik has also worked extensively on stage, including starring in the Off-Broadway production Who’s Your Baghdaddy, or How I Started the Iraq War from 2017 to 2018. The play satirizes the events leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
The actress headlined the one-woman show I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, New York in 2016, where she regaled audiences with tales of love, loss and all of the meals along the way. The stage comedy was adapted from Giulia Melucci’s 2010 memoir of the same name.
“When you [read the memoir], you feel like you’re hanging out with a friend,” she explained. “[This] seems like the most simple thing in the world but to really be able to create that environment artistically, and have that be what you’re trying to give people as an experience, I just think there’s nothing more profound than that.”
The actress entered a new career phase in the past few years, as she’s started playing moms on TV sitcoms. Speaking to E! News in 2020, Oleynik joked that she was fully embracing being “in the mom zone” stage of her career.
“Being in the ‘mom zone’ is the best,” she declared. “That’s…what I’m going out for right now, not exclusively, but that’s just where I’m at. And it’s actually a huge relief.”
She returned to Nickelodeon once again with a starring role in 2023’s Erin & Aaron, a live-action sitcom about teenage stepsiblings struggling to coexist in a blended family. The former Alex Mack star — who plays the title characters’ mother on Erin & Aaron— said that her latest Nickelodeon role “really” felt like a full-circle moment.
“I auditioned for the show just like any other audition,” she told Sweety High in 2023. “I, like most actors in the last couple years, have just been doing self-tape after self-tape after self-tape. This one came up, and I know the casting director really well, and I initially responded to the material and thought it seemed really fun. It was only after the fact that I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be on Nickelodeon again — as a mom!’ It’s been really fun.”
She went on, “Even though the setup is different on this show — not only because it’s 25 years later, but also we’re also in a studio, and it’s a multi-cam show, while Alex Mack was single-calm out in Valencia — I’m really flooded with a lot of those memories in really positive ways. I’m in touch with a lot of the cast and I’m on a text thread right now with some of the crew, so close with hair and makeup and wardrobe. There’s something about it that feels really lovely, actually. It feels like family.”
