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PASADENA, Calif. -- Nobody would mistake the Norton Simon Museum for 24's CTU.
The atmosphere is peaceful, not pulsating, with nary a hint of nerve gas as Mary Lynn Rajskub, the Fox thriller's ultracompetent, hypercranky Chloe O'Brian, roams the galleries, taking in Impressionist paintings and sculpture from India.
Initially reserved, in an endearingly self-conscious way that's light-years from Hollywood glib, Rajskub (pronounced RICE-cub) lights up when she sees the work of Russian artist Chaim Soutine.
"I love his paintings because they're emotional and kind of crazy. He was troubled and you can see it in his paintings," she says. "He was like bursting out his emotions."
Rajskub, 34, started as a painter, which led in a connect-the-dots way to an acting career. After studying in her native Michigan, she attended the San Francisco Art Institute.
24 doesn't leave much time for art, but the acting salary offers a perk: "I don't worry about buying supplies anymore."
Her painting style is "a mixture of words and images and gestures. I like to scribble and I like abstract stuff, but I also like for there to be something to look at," she says, admiring a Degas ballerina painting.
Rajskub didn't enjoy having to sell her work, so she shifted to performance art. She describes that as similar to a sculpture or painting except the artist uses her body and other objects in the work. Her efforts were acting oriented and she interacted with the audience.
Over time, "I just started doing characters that were making fun of performance art. ... People were laughing at it," she says.
She stops to praise a Paul Klee work for its warmth and playfulness.
After moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, Rajskub fell in with a group of comic performers, including David Cross, whom she dated. She got her big break on Cross and Bob Odenkirk's HBO sketch series Mr. Show. Later, she became a regular on The Larry Sanders Show, a critically acclaimed HBO comedy, followed by appearances in numerous TV and film comedies and two sketch shows.
If that seems a long distance from the deadly serious 24, Rajskub agrees. "I didn't want to go" to meet the writers, she says. "I'd had a really bad CSI audition." But her mother, a 24 fan, told her to go.
24 co-creator Joel Surnow thought she would be great for the show's third season as an offbeat character who could give 24's audience a rare reason to smile.
In the film Punch-Drunk Love, "she was really kind of in her own world. What she wanted, she wanted. She was almost autistic in her inability to relate to other people. That's where we started," he says.
Rajskub, who possesses a smile and sense of humor that might seem foreign to Chloe, admits to some shared traits: impatience, tunnel vision and a strong feeling that she's right.
On set, Rajskub was great, Surnow says. Early on, however, the self-deprecating actress says she kept waiting to be fired because she thought she was "too weird."
But Chloe's popularity pleases Rajskub. When one interviewer asked if she feared typecasting, she thought, "I'm just getting used to having a character that has developed and has more than one scene. So let's slow down."
Success led to Glamour, where she's featured in the May issue. She's excited about singing a song she wrote, '89 Volvo, on WB's Gilmore Girls (May 9), and she hopes to do a one-woman show this summer.
And she's thrilled that Chloe had an overnight guest this season. "Chloe in bed with a hot guy? It's the best," she says.
Things aren't as busy in Rajskub's personal life. Right now, her poodle qualifies as a significant other. She says she doesn't believe in love, sticking to that statement when asked a second time. In relationships, "I always think it's going to work out, but it never does."
James Morrison, who plays ousted CTU boss Bill Buchanan, sees a definite sex appeal in both Chloe and Rajskub. "Hidden underneath that beautiful, wonderful geek she's created ... is a smart, genuinely sexy person."
Rajskub, who had a supporting role in the Harrison Ford movie Firewall, enjoys it when viewers approach her and say how much they like her acting, but she worries about that, too.
"It's not healthy to have people come up and say, 'I think you're great,'" she says, sitting on an outdoor bench near a Rodin sculpture.
As if on cue, three teen girls approach to say they love Chloe. Rajskub takes a photo with one, then laughs at the timing.
"That was pretty outrageous," she says. "That was funny."
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