Unqualified

  “Mom, I love you so much and how supportive you are, and I could never pursue this career without you,” I explained. “But as I’m going up for different roles or choosing projects, I really can’t have your voice in the back of my head influencing my decisions.” I wanted to play interesting characters and great people and horrible people and I couldn’t reject opportunities that I really wanted to take on because I was worried about my mom, and she understood that.

  When Smiley Face came out, my parents came to Sundance for the midnight screening and it was one of the best nights of my life. They laughed so hard. In fact, my dad was in such heavy hysterics I actually thought he might be having a heart attack, and it was so gratifying to see my mom doubled over in laughter, too.

  Obviously having close, wonderful, supportive parents is a blessing. But a word of caution for any of you readers who are as lucky as I am in that department: You know those moments when your parents are so proud of you that they start bragging about you in ways that are just horribly embarrassing? And even though, deep down, you love that they’re shouting your praises to anyone who will listen, you are mostly just horrified? You know how you assumed that might end after high school? And then after college? And then, maybe after your first job? I’m here to tell you that, nope, it never ends. Especially from dad.

  EMBARRASSING, BUT ADORABLE, BUT MOSTLY EMBARRASSING DAD MOMENT #1

  In 2007, I was tied to a biopic about porn star Linda Lovelace that I didn’t end up appearing in. But when outlets first started reporting that I would be involved, New York magazine mentioned it with the headline ANNA FARIS SUCKS and added the slightly snarky line, “Her parents must be thrilled!” So my dad wrote an impassioned letter to the editor about their complicity in sexism in Hollywood and how they would never say that about a man, and they published it. “I am Anna’s father,” he wrote in a 264-word note that you can still read online. “It’s an interesting question why actresses are criticized for the moral behavior of the characters they portray, but male actors are not. No one suggested that Robert De Niro’s parents would be aghast at seeing him, as Al Capone, bash someone’s head with a baseball bat. No one surmised that Al Pacino’s mom would be mortified to see her son play a Michael Corleone who organizes uncounted brutal murders. No one raised an eyebrow at John Malkovich’s decision to portray a would-be presidential assassin. And rightly so.” He went on to explain that when a “talented, and brave, young actress” (thanks, Dad!) considers taking a controversial role, the media treats it differently.

  It was so wonderful of my father but also mortifying.

  EMBARRASSING, BUT ADORABLE, BUT MOSTLY EMBARRASSING DAD MOMENT #2

  My dad and one of our Mom writer-producers have developed a friendship based on music. My dad’s a music aficionado and has thousands of CDs and vinyl records that clutter up the whole house and make my mom insane. Somehow my dad and this guy started bonding over old tracks and now they send each other their favorite recordings of, like, Bob Dylan at some obscure club in 1990. So one day I came to work and this colleague greeted me and said, laughing, “I have to tell you that your dad emailed me and said you were the best actress of your generation.” What?! Daaaaaad! This guy very obviously didn’t say that my dad was right. He was just like, “I thought it was really, really funny.”

  Again. Mortifying.

  EMBARRASSING, BUT INFURIATING ADORABLE, BUT MOSTLY EMBARRASSING DAD MOMENT #3

  In middle school I was named a bus patrol crossing guard. It was a coveted gig that you had to be hand-selected for by the teachers. I led everyone to the bus in an orderly fashion and I had a pink slip so I could write people up if they misbehaved and I would do demonstrations once a year about what to do in case of an emergency, soberly explaining how you were supposed to exit the bus through the back door. It gave me such a high. I was so proud that I had made the cut and that I got to wear the special bus patrol vest, and I was especially stoked that I’d earned the gig on my own merit. Mr. Kincaid, the librarian who ran the program, could obviously see that I was a natural leader and therefore deserved the vest and the badge. Even though I was short and quiet, he could see I was worthy.

  Years later, over dinner one night, my father revealed that he had called Mr. Kincaid when the big bus patrol crossing guard decision was being made. “Anna wants this more than she wants a pony,” he’d said. “She may be short but please don’t overlook her for bus patrol.”

  I was devastated. Even all those years later it messed with my head. Turns out I was chosen because my dad intervened and not at all because someone could finally see the little tyrant in me.

  Really, really mortifying.

  • • •

  My parents appeared on my podcast once. They were staying with me and I wanted to give our listeners a glimpse into who they are as a couple. They have a really impressive story in that they’ve been married since they were twenty-one and they have things figured out that not all of us do, like how to keep each other laughing after four decades. And my brother and I are both really close with them, so that feels slightly unusual. (Or is it just unusual in Hollywood, which sometimes seems full of divorce and estranged family relationships?)

  Despite their one fourteen-minute interview on Anna Faris Is Unqualified, my parents don’t listen to the podcast. I sort of told them not to, and they sort of don’t know how to, and I’m sort of grateful that they don’t. As I’m recording, I certainly don’t want to be thinking about how they’d react as I, I don’t know, fake an orgasm. I expose myself in a totally different way during the podcast than I do when I’m acting because I’m not reciting somebody else’s lines. It’s all me, and we talk about stuff I would never ever dream of talking to my mom about, stuff she would scold me for talking about in front of her. Like vagina hair and blow jobs.

  My parents have given me so much: the freedom and encouragement to pursue my dream, the model of a marriage to strive toward, and support through some really hard times. They also influenced some of the qualities that perhaps aren’t always my best. My mom raised me to have a high level of emotional defense that has been very helpful for me as an actor but has also turned out to be a major character flaw. It’s why I enjoy giving other people advice so much, rather than getting it for myself. Doling out guidance helps me to not get caught up in my own self-analysis. I think this stems from the Waspy idea of not talking about your feelings. It’s also the reason my parents hate therapy, because they think it means admitting there’s something really wrong with you. You should maintain a constant attempt at normalcy at all times, they would say. We’re the kind of family where no one is allowed to be a victim, which is an overall good thing but makes it hard to admit to moments of sadness or hurt. Especially when you’re reading about people stuck in refugee camps and you have good fortune and are in Hollywood and you’re an actress making money who can splurge on, I don’t know, a Chanel bag. I’m very aware of my good fortune.

  That high emotional defense has defined who I am, but there’s a lack of openness in that attitude. At this stage in my life I’m attempting to become more open (hence this book) and to tell my friends what’s going on with me and to ask for advice, but I find it difficult. It just feels incredibly indulgent to talk about my “problems,” which, in the scheme of things, aren’t anything. I’ve been unusually fortunate. I was raised in a safe, happy home with loving parents, I have a healthy son, a supportive family and a great career, and whatever hitches there were along the way, most other people have had to overcome bigger shit, so how can I ask for sympathy? Not that my parents were constantly telling me to shut up and stop whining or anything like that—but it was a message I absorbed nonetheless.

  I’m trying not to pass my high defense onto my son. There is so much that my parents did, and still do, for me that I want to do for Jack. I want to always provide him the best education I can, and encourage him to find a passion and pursue it, and to read him stories before bed
at night, at least for as long as he’ll let me. But, without sounding too much like a touchy-feely Hollywood mom, I’m proud when Jack can express his feelings in a healthy way. Recently, the two of us were home alone and Chris was out of town. Jack was acting a little withdrawn and was playing by himself quietly, which I haven’t seen him to do very much. So I asked him, “Jack, is something bothering you?”

  He didn’t respond, but was quiet and I could tell something was going on. “Could you please tell me?” I said.

  “I miss Daddy,” he said. I was impressed that he was able to be so honest and pinpoint his feelings and recognize them and tell me about them without being guarded. I can barely do that and I’m a thirty-nine-year-old woman.

  But I’ll get better, and one day when Jack’s potentially going to play a porn star in a biopic, I’ll be that beaming mom writing a letter to an editor expressing my pride for all the world to see.

  Playing House

  It would be easy to say that my first marriage was a mistake. It ended in divorce, so clearly it wasn’t the best decision I ever made. But when I look back on that relationship, it barely seems real. It felt as if we were play-acting at being married. The whole thing was like a performance we were putting on. Oh yeah, this is what married people do. They buy a car and a house. After dating and living together, marriage seemed like the next grown-up step, and in an industry where there is so much uncertainty and instability, the trajectory of our relationship felt like something we could control.

  Let me back up. Ben and I started dating when I was twenty-two. As you may remember, dear reader, we met in Seattle while filming Lovers Lane, and I was crushing on him, hard. After the movie we talked a bit, so I called him when I flew down to meet the man who eventually became my manager, and we hooked up the entire time. It was fun—of course it was. He was hot and was an actor and had the fancy LA life that I was in awe of.

  Soon after that weekend, my manager called and asked me to fly down to audition for Scary Movie. I stayed at Ben’s apartment, which was basically a frat house of really hot guys, and during that week I got the role of Cindy Campbell. There was an immediate shift in the power dynamic of our relationship after that, though I didn’t clock it at the time. I was so dizzy with the idea of doing a movie and getting a gig, it never occurred to me that this moment of success could have a negative impact on what was then a budding relationship. Right after I booked the role, Ben and I walked into his place and he announced that I had just gotten the lead in a Wayans brothers movie, and one of his roommates looked at me and said: “Well, you got lucky.” It wasn’t especially kind. But now that I think about it, that shift from me being the adoring Seattle fangirl—Oh, you go to clubs?! You have agents?!—to suddenly having a gig and an agent of my own was probably surreal for Ben, too.

  When I moved to LA for good after getting the role, Ben and I started officially dating. Four months later, we moved in together. It was sort of by accident. Ben had been living with a roommate, but things weren’t going well between them so he asked if he could stay at my place. I was hesitant—it certainly felt fast—but also thrilled, because I loved him. I think we both thought living together would be temporary, but then it wasn’t. I realize now, of course, that I didn’t think it through, because you can’t really backtrack to just dating after you live with someone, and I learned that the hard way. We bounced from apartment to apartment, and I hid the fact that we were living together from my parents for almost two years. They knew I was dating Ben. In fact, when my mom first met him she was superswoony at his looks, which only reinforced for me the idea that I should stick with this relationship. But when my parents came to visit, which wasn’t nearly as often as I went to Washington, I made him stay with friends and hide his stuff and we did a whole crafty lie job. Deep down, I knew that moving in together after only four months—two of which I had spent shooting Scary Movie in Vancouver—was something I should keep quiet.

  We lived together for a while more before getting engaged. There were six months between the proposal in the watch store and the one in the hotel. My first marriage refusal had become a big argument in our relationship, so when the second one came along, I certainly felt like I had to say yes. It’s not like I wanted to date anybody else—I didn’t. I loved Ben. But I also felt like I didn’t have the time or the courage to be single in Los Angeles. You see, another aspect of my high defense mechanism involved never letting myself get bummed out if I didn’t get a role. I wouldn’t dwell on my failures or even talk about them, to Ben or to anyone. I felt like I had to keep my guard up, and being single and dating makes you vulnerable. Trying to become an actor was already terrifying enough, to add searching for a relationship and friends to that list? That felt like too much. I couldn’t handle the idea of rejection in that many places at once.

  And so we got engaged. You know those articles that the New York Times publishes every few years that list some variation of the questions you should ask your partner before you get married? Things like, “Do our ideas about spending match?” and “Will we have children?” and “If we do, will we raise them with religion?” Ben and I asked each other none of these questions. We briefly brought up kids right before getting married, and he told me he didn’t want any. I explained that I couldn’t marry him if that was a certainty because I didn’t know what I wanted, so he agreed not to take children off the table. That was the extent of our prep for our life together.

  In reading this all back, it seems clear that there were plenty of red flags in this relationship. We obviously weren’t ready for marriage, at least not to each other. I’ve often tried to understand my rationale for getting married the first time, because it does seem baffling to commit to a lifelong relationship when there are so many glaring problems. I still wonder why I did that, and I don’t fully have the answers and I don’t know if I ever will. But I know that it felt like we were crossing something off the list. Live together, check. Marriage, check.

  Listeners often call into the podcast with similar situations. They might be dating someone despite a ton of red flags—they’re asking themselves questions like, Why does this person make me feel bad? Why do I let him?—or they’re just not sure how they feel about whomever it is they’re dating. In those cases, the caller usually already knows what he or she needs to do and doesn’t really need to hear it from us. But back then, when Ben and I were about to get hitched, I never even let myself ask those questions. I was too proud. And the truth is that I resisted asking for any kind of help. Maybe because I was something of a loner, always the girl with only a couple of friends. But the bigger concern than my number of friends was my hesitance to confide in the friends I had. For a long time, especially in my twenties, I drove female friends away because while I loved to talk about their problems, I never wanted to divulge or confront any of my own.

  My brother and I have talked about this a lot. He and I have both had failed marriages. And we were the product of a really great one. My mom and dad love each other. They get a kick out of each other. My dad still makes my mom laugh and is always telling her how beautiful she is. So on paper, it would seem that Bob and I should have had stable relationships right out of the gate. But now we’ve come to think that maybe it was because of the pressure we put on ourselves to check off the “happily married” box that we didn’t really examine the flaws in some of our relationships as well as we should have.

  It’s not that our parents pressured us to get married young. Except, maybe they did. Like this one time, when I was thirteen, I told my dad that I didn’t want to get married until I was twenty-seven, and he said, “Well that makes me kind of sad.”

  “Why, Dad?” I asked.

  “Because I think you are going to want to experience intimacy before then,” he said. “And Mom and I think you should wait until you are married.”

  My parents say they waited until they were married to have sex, and my brother and I both felt some pres
sure to do the same. But I think there was also a pressure into monogamy, too. That definitely contributed to my fear of being single or dating or having sexual encounters of any kind. I felt so inexperienced, and I was taught that I should want to stay that way.

  (I never actually intended to wait until I was married, though. My parents eventually found out that Ben and I were living together and they ultimately had no illusions about what was going on.)

  Ben and I were married for two and a half years. Our wedding was in 2004, when I was twenty-seven, and we were together until shortly after my thirtieth birthday, in 2007. It was a rough time for both of us. I was singularly focused on my career at that point, and Ben repeatedly accused me of putting my work first. I couldn’t understand what he was getting at. I kept thinking, I’m in one of the most competitive businesses in the world; if I don’t put all of myself into this career I’m not going to have it.

  During the weeks just before my thirtieth birthday, people kept asking me what I was going to do to celebrate. I’d never been a big birthday person in general, but for this one I rented a great big house about three and a half hours north of LA in Paso Robles. There were eight couples, and it was a really great trip. There was a no-gifts rule, but I told everyone that I wanted them to either make something or perform something, and my friends rose to the occasion. (If there is a theme of this book, maybe it’s that if we ever meet, please come prepared with song and dance.) It was a huge success and a total blast of a weekend. But I spent not one moment alone with Ben, and I noticed it. Even then I was thinking, This is odd. I’m staying up all night talking in bed with my girlfriends, Ben is downstairs playing Ping-Pong, and I’m happy about that. Huh.