Thora Birch landed on the big screen with her debut role in the movie “Purple People Eater” (1988) and had a run of movies as a child actress including “Patriot Games” (1992), “Hocus Pocus” (1993), and “Monkey Trouble” (1994). She starred in “American Beauty” (1999) and went on to appear in “Dungeons and Dragons” (2000), “The Hole” (2001), and “Ghost World” (2001). Birch appeared in “Affairs of State” (2018), “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” (2019), and “Above Suspicion” (2019) after taking fewer roles throughout the 2010s. She appeared in the movies “13 Minutes” (2021) from director Lindsay Gossling and “The Chronology of Water” (2025), the directorial debut of Kristen Stewart. Birch starred as Liz Murray in the Lifetime movie “Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story” (2003), a role for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. She went on to star in the hit AMC series “The Walking Dead” (2019–2020). She made her directorial debut with the TV movie “The Gabby Petito Story” (2022).