When you’re doing Shakespeare, Anna Chlumsky says, you talk in iambic pentameter even when you’re offstage. If you’re on HBO’s “Veep” — one of the most profane shows on TV — you curse.
Which is why she’s always reaching for euphemisms when she’s with her young daughters.
“I say ‘bullshirt!’ a lot,” confesses the Brooklyn mother of two. “And ‘Jiminy Christmas!’”
Curses and all, “Veep” snagged a SAG Award last Sunday for best ensemble. But neither Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who stars as its hot mess of a leader, Selina Meyer, nor Chlumsky, who plays Selina’s frazzled chief of staff, were there to receive it.
As Louis-Dreyfus revealed in September, a day after winning her sixth Emmy for her role, she’d just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Since then, Chlumsky says, the former “Seinfeld” star has completed several rounds of chemotherapy, and plans to rejoin the cast this summer to shoot the show’s seventh and final season.
“She’s a champ!” Chlumsky tells The Post. “She says she feels like she’s getting stronger every day. But there’s still plenty for her to go through. We just want to be as supportive as we can be.”
Chlumsky, 37, had a far happier reason for missing the SAG Awards ceremony: She’s performing off-Broadway. In “Cardinal,” opening Tuesday, she plays a woman who hopes to revive her crumbling hometown by literally painting it red. Along the way, she tumbles in and out of bed with its mayor, played by Adam Pally.
There’s a lot of tussling under the sheets and stripping down to their undies — scenes that might have been quite uncomfortable had they not been discussed and choreographed. It helps, Chlumsky says, that Pally, of TV’s “Happy Endings,” is “a gentleman.”
Which is more than she can say about a director in her past that she won’t name, who teased her, in front of others, about the “no nipple” clause in her contract.
“I was, like, ‘You guys don’t pay me enough to tease me like this,’” she recalls. And while she’s been spared the #MeToo horror stories shared by many colleagues, she’s been taunted and slapped, all in the name of acting. “It’s a power struggle,” she says, “and it’s veiled in a conversation about ‘the work.’”
She’s been doing that work for a long time. The Chicago native modeled for her first ad at 10 months and had her breakthrough at 11 years old, when she shared an MTV Movie Award-winning kiss with Macaulay Culkin in 1991’s “My Girl.” Several other films followed. And then, in 1999, she disappeared. For six years.
Most of that time was spent at the University of Chicago, where she got a degree in international affairs and met the man she married, former Army reservist Shaun So. But mostly, she says, she’d given up on acting. It became too painful to be rejected because she didn’t look “right,” “and not having the power to change the things I was being rejected for.”
So began several years of drinking, kung fu and odd jobs, including being a Zagat Survey fact-checker. In 2002, a publishing gig brought her to New York. It was there she saw Mercedes Ruehl rip her way through Broadway’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?”
“That was classic Edward Albee,” says Chlumsky, who wrote her Advanced Placement Literature essay on Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
“It was amazing! And I realized I didn’t care about rejection — I had to act.”
So she has. In August, she’ll be back on the set of “Veep,” swearing a blue streak.
“There’s no way you can come up with curses like our writers do,” she says, proudly. “They sit there and really bang ’em out.” No bullshirt!
Warning: Graphic language