'24' actress wary of success

Even an insecure Mary Lynn Rajskub can't deny that this is her year, but she's not ready yet to seize the day.

"I'm socially awkward. I'm a little too into my own head," says the 34-year-old actress. "There's a whole new level of insecurities a person can have with success."

Nonetheless, she has made CTU administrative assistant Chloe O'Brian a fan favorite on the Fox series "24," and now she's trying to parlay that success into feature films. Starting Friday, she can be seen in the action flick "Firewall," in which she plays a loyal assistant to Harrison Ford's character.

With a hit TV series, a movie and standup-comedy dates around the country, Rajskub (pronounced "race-cub") has been working for more than a decade to get to where she is. To hear her talk about herself and her career, she might be happier with struggling than with success.

"I can no longer deny that I am a working actress. . . . I used to be able to say to myself that this was just (a phase). I have to question my own level of investment in all this," says Rajskub, who is single but has a newly adopted poodle as her companion at home.

Rajskub lived in a suburb of Detroit until she was 21, when she moved to San Francisco to attend art school and be a performance artist. Once there, she started doing comedy.

She says she found work as "the quirky oddball who was really nobody's girlfriend." Her resume includes HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show" and NBC's "Veronica's Closet."

Rajskub auditioned for "24." It was the first time she landed something dramatic, but she almost didn't go to the audition.

"I had a really bad experience at an audition for 'CSI.' It wasn't, as an actor, that I didn't think I could play drama, but the energy for auditioning (for a dramatic role) had a very different feel to it," she says.

Producers on "24" had seen Rajskub's work elsewhere, and she says they remembered her when she auditioned. "That's the only reason I got this part," she says.

Chloe is an unconventional character for an action series. She's flippant, dry and usually just a step away from the thick of the action. Five seasons into the show's run, Chloe is the sort of cult favorite who commands a loyal following on the Internet.

Fans write their own stories of romance between Chloe and Jack (played by Kiefer Sutherland). On the series, such a development has never occurred. The message boards light up whenever Chloe gets to do something more than comment on the action around her.