by Anna Faris
I was telling him because I thought it would be attractive to him—and that’s fucked-up. You know what’s not attractive to guys? Thinking about the women they love with other dudes and discussing all the partners they’ve had. (At least, not usually. Some guys have creepy fetishes, and I can’t speak for them.)
Chris told me that whatever I’d done and whomever I’d done it with, it didn’t bother him and he didn’t need to know.
That, in turn, made me feel pretty embarrassed. I had been not-so-subtly searching for how many women he’d been with, and I’m confident it was a lot more than four or five. He was casual and cool about it when I finally tried to get it out of him. “I don’t know,” he kept saying. “I really don’t know.” It was so frustrating. What do you mean you don’t know? His approach to his sexuality was the opposite of how I viewed my own, which apparently was strictly a numbers game. If it got too high, I thought, somebody somewhere is not going to value me.
This is why I’m terrified at the idea of having a daughter one day. I would love it, but I would also have a lot of complicated feelings regarding teaching her how to view her body and her self-worth. I wouldn’t want her to learn any of these crazy “my value is tied to my number” lessons from me. And I say that because I do think my own views in that regard, at least back when I started dating Chris, came largely from my mom. Or maybe it was 80 percent my mom, 20 percent graduating high school in 1994, when there was still very much a stigma of being a slut if you fucked some dude at a keg party.
(Raising a boy comes with its own challenges. It’s so important to me that Jack always treats his lovers, or significant others, with respect. I would be furious with him if I heard about a drunken party and got a phone call from some girl’s parents saying that Jack took advantage of their daughter last night. There is going to be a day where I need to explain to him that he will have all these crazy urges and he needs to fight them with every ounce of his body. I want to raise a smart, kind son who is strong enough to resist what I imagine will be superintense physical longings. Otherwise he is going to a boarding school in Idaho where they’ll beat his ass.)
Looking back now, I wish I had slept with more people, simply so I could learn to be a better lover and know how to tackle more positions and make better noises. I am not envious of the people I know who have slept with only three people, but my friend who can’t even count the people she’s slept with? I’m envious of that. That’s a study abroad program that I just never went on. But I don’t think I could fundamentally change the part of me that has sex with a lot of emotional investment. If I were to have slept with forty men, the mental exhaustion of it would have wrecked me.
Also, as I found out the hard way, I am a terrible one-night stand. I was really hard on myself the next day, wondering if I made a mistake and if the guy liked me and if I was good in bed and then getting mad at myself . . . doing that more often would have been a disaster. Any degree of empowerment that accompanied my sexual freedom would have been squandered by my need to please even the most random lover. Thus is the curse of the self-obsessed narcissist.
Comedy, Fame, and the Gross Words
My first taste of fame was when I was nineteen. I was walking across the University of Washington campus and this girl came up to me and excitedly said, “I just got hired at Red Robin and you’re in the training video!” It was true. I played the perfect hostess who picks up the restaurant phone, looks into the camera, and says: “Here at Red Robin, we always give good phone.”
Five years ago, Chris and I went to Red Robin and an employee came up to our table. “Oh my God!” she said. “They are still using that training video!”
All I could think was, Fuck no.
• • •
I never expected to end up in comedy. My family maintains that I was a funny kid, but I remember myself, at least in public, as quiet and serious. Funny thoughts were always in the back of my head, but I never said them out loud because it was way too terrifying. I always wanted to be daring, but I couldn’t stand the thought of ridicule from my classmates. There was nothing scarier to me than the idea of other kids making fun of me, so I was never the class clown. I was never outspoken. I suppressed a lot. As a result, ending up in comedy was a huge surprise, and I’m still not sure if I’ve embraced it as my thing. It has not been a Cinderella shoe situation for me at all. So many of the funny people I work with spent their lives trying to succeed in comedy. They were doing standup before they got their big breaks, and before that they were goofing off in front of the class. They had a natural affinity for making people laugh that I never had.
There was one time, when I was working as a receptionist at my father’s ad agency, that I remember suddenly understanding the power of landing a laugh. It was the summer before my sophomore year of college and I was filling in for an employee on maternity leave. I felt so important, walking around downtown Seattle during my lunch hour in my little “corporate” dresses. Nothing sexy, just Old Navy stuff. But I’d sit and eat my lunch alongside executives outside in Pioneer Square and I had this feeling like I belonged there. This is my new world, the corporate world of Seattle. I would get looks from men and it always felt good, even though I told myself I hated it.
One day, I had a knit dress and my backpack on and I was getting more looks than I normally did, and I started to feel that rage bubble up in me. This is offensive! Men are pigs! Of course I also liked attention, otherwise I wouldn’t have bleached my hair blond, but that is the constant struggle of being a woman—do we love the leering looks or do we hate them? But I was really starting to brew with anger, until finally this woman in a truck yelled out to me. “Hey, lady! Your ass is showing!” I felt behind me and my dress had creeped up below my backpack and I was wearing granny panties and it was mortifying.
There’s nothing like feeling like you have the upper hand and then having your arrogance knocked down ten pegs. It happens to celebrities a lot. You think somebody is recognizing you but really there’s something in your teeth. But in that dress mishap moment, all I could do was go back to the office and tell everyone what happened. It felt like the only way to conquer the embarrassment was to vomit the story back up. My coworkers couldn’t stop laughing, and that was the first time I thought to embrace the comedy approach. It seemed like a much better strategy than just bottling everything up, because at least making people laugh made me feel powerful. Certainly it was more empowering than feeling shame-faced all day.
My first true experience with comedy acting was playing Cindy Campbell in Scary Movie. When I auditioned for the role, I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that it was my first big Hollywood audition and I wanted the part. I didn’t know this at the time, but acting in a spoof movie requires a weird skill set, because it calls for a degree of earnestness, and if nothing else, I was incredibly earnest back then. Even today, sarcasm is something that is fairly unfamiliar to me. It’s not my go-to and it certainly wasn’t when I was twenty-two and totally new in LA. So when I auditioned, I was totally committed. I never broke character, and Keenen Ivory Wayans, who directed the movie, couldn’t stop laughing. Like, really laughing. I was so baffled. What was I doing that was funny? I had no clue. Later into the filming process, in a total moment of “Daddy, please like me,” I indulgently asked Keenen why he hired me. “Because you had no idea what you were doing,” he told me.
“Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween” was the original title for Scary Movie.
Though I’d acted before Scary Movie, landing that role felt like going straight from a high school baseball team to the majors. (Not that I know anything about baseball.) And Keenen was right. I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I was willing to completely buy into the idea of Cindy Campbell, and the movie was great training in terms of technicality. You had to learn how to bring a banana into frame at exactly the right moment or how to get hit in the head with a microphone or ho
w to rip your shirt open to show your pig nipples. And as absurd as it sounds, that stuff is hard. The physicality of comedy acting—learning how to fall, for example—is taxing.
And so, even though I’d never expected to work in comedy, I was grateful for that education as an actor. Also, I’d never worked that hard in my life. I went from being a lazy college stoner to working fifteen-hour days where things were actually expected of me. That was a great wake-up call. When I got the Scary Movie job I truly thought I was already a superhard worker, but it turned out I had no idea what hard work was until that film. It was the kind of work for which you give up everything in your life—your loved ones, your home—to move on location, work long hours, and live out of a hotel. I was doing something I loved and I was really grateful for the role, and I don’t mean to sound whiny because I know how fortunate I am, but it was definitely a rude awakening in terms of what a career in acting was going to mean. After filming that part, I started to get the hang of the job and I realized that I’m incredibly privileged, but the tradeoff was prioritizing my career above everything else, and knowing that I’d be working all hours, and always on call, and that came as a bit of a surprise.
The other surprise, I think, was just how successful Scary Movie and the franchise became. After the first movie was a success and then the sequel was a hit, I very arrogantly got resentful of the series because I couldn’t get auditions for dramatic roles and I had always thought of myself as a really dramatic person. It took me a little while to embrace the idea of playing a stupid character. For a long time I took it personally. I worried that if I’m playing the stupid person, that must mean people thought I was stupid. Once, on social media, someone wrote, “Anna Faris is good in the Scary Movies, but I think it’s because she’s as dumb as she plays.” (You can get one hundred compliments but it’s the one nasty comment that wakes you up in the middle of the night.) That type of shit used to really irk me, but now I love that I got my start in a spoof comedy. At this point I wouldn’t change a thing about having played Cindy Campbell or about my comedy career. I love the joy that my roles have brought me. Like playing Samantha James in Just Friends, which might be the most fun I’ve ever had playing a character. Our brilliant director Roger Kumble had this vision of Samantha as totally psychotic, and some of my best lines were Roger’s in the moment. He’d say, “Yell out, ‘Stupid dick!’” and we’d just giggle and continue to push the insanity. One of the craziest scenes was when Samantha eats the toothpaste. On the day we filmed it, Roger suggested it at the last minute and I was just like, “Sure! I love that!” But because it was last-minute, the props department was not prepared for it. If they had been, hopefully they would have given me toothpaste substitute. Instead, I shoved a whole tube of toothpaste in my mouth, and after that I didn’t have taste buds for three days. For real. I’d eat a whole bag of spicy Doritos and not taste a thing. With roles like that, I learned to laugh at myself in ways I never could before.
I love the challenge of comedy, too, because it really is unbelievably challenging. Part of the difficulty is surrendering to the lack of vanity—I have to understand that the world is going to view me as a bimbo and make peace with that. And there’s been a lot of reward in embracing the flawed characters that I play. But I was naive when I came to Hollywood, simply in the sense that I didn’t understand how divided this town was, in terms of being a comedic actor or a dramatic actor. They truly are two different worlds.
• • •
Scary Movie was released in 2000, and after that I started getting recognized every now and then. I’ve never smoked crack, but it felt like what I imagine the first hit must be like. An immediate head rush. The first time I felt that very specific kind of ego-driven high was at the movie’s premiere in New York. It was my first premiere, and I really felt like I was in this magical ecstasy dream. There were people calling my name—well, they were saying Anna, rhymes with banana, but I didn’t give a shit. Someone lent me a dress and I was staying at a fancy hotel and executives were saying the movie was going to make more than they ever thought possible, and it was an unbelievable, out-of-body euphoria.
After the movie came out I returned to blond (Cindy Campbell was a brunette), so I didn’t get noticed in public very often. A couple of times people thought I was Britney Spears, which was flattering. But even though I wasn’t consistently being “spotted,” I’ll admit I had a few ugly celebrity moments.
The worst of it came over Christmas 2002, when I was twenty-six. I went with my brother and cousins to a bowling alley near my parents’ place in Washington and, after a couple of hours hanging out at the bar, the manager cut me off. I’d only had two beers and wasn’t especially drunk, and I got annoyed, which I think was fair, except that it provoked me to utter that very hideous phrase: “Don’t you know who I am?”
As soon as the words came out of my mouth, all I could think was, What the fuck did I just say?
The manager’s response: “You’re out of here.” She didn’t know, or care, who I was, and I can’t say I blame her.
I felt such shame—not for getting kicked out of the bowling alley bar but for uttering those words. Had I really become that gross? Was I really the person who was drunk on her own ego? And what had I done, really? The Hot Chick?
When I woke up the next day, I was horribly embarrassed. I could hardly recognize myself. What kind of self-important person utters that phrase? I’m just so glad that we didn’t yet live in a world where everyone had their iPhone in hand at all times. There was no social media or viral videos. In that regard, I got lucky. But I didn’t know, in that moment, to be thankful that Facebook didn’t exist yet. Instead, I kept thinking of how disappointed and mortified my parents would have been if they had heard me say that kind of thing. That knowledge haunted me, and I was ashamed.
Looking back on that evening, at the risk of sounding like a total cliché, I think I was destined to learn that lesson the hard way. In the wake of Scary Movie’s early success, it was really difficult to go from merely dreaming of acting in Hollywood to getting a role to suddenly having people kissing my ass who only three days earlier viewed me with skepticism. And of course I wanted to believe that I was as great as everyone was saying I was. It became a mind fuck, and sifting through the noise to find the people I could trust to actually look at my work and see my potential, but also keep me grounded, was tricky.
That night at the bowling alley was a wake-up call. Fifteen years later, I still have complicated feelings about fame. Don’t get me wrong—I feel incredibly lucky and grateful to have the life and career that I do. I remember watching Gwyneth Paltrow on Oprah after she won Best Actress for Shakespeare in Love in the late nineties. Oprah said something like, “You’re hugely famous now. What’s that like?” Gwyneth described it as “white-hot” and started to complain a little bit. I wasn’t famous at all at that point, but I remember seeing that clip and thinking that if I ever succeeded in Hollywood I would never complain about fame like that. But it does make you feel vulnerable; I realize that now.
Truth be told, I have a lot of guilt wrapped up in my success. I’m glad that I feel good about what I do creatively, and I’ve worked incredibly hard for my career, but there is a degree of embarrassment around getting put on a weird pedestal, and being in a job that’s valued more than somebody who does something else for a living that is perhaps more important but not nearly as luxurious.
• • •
There’s nowhere where Hollywood’s self-important attitude is on display more than at awards shows. My brother once told me that no industry in the world congratulates itself as much as the entertainment industry, and he was right. Not that I’m drowning in statuettes, but I should point out that you are holding in your hands a book written by none other than the High Times 2007 Stonette of the Year.
The red carpet, for all its fanfare, is actually a really humbling experience. Even if you’re at, say, the Oscars, and some
people are yelling your name, you end up behind Brad and Angelina or Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban and it’s just . . . well, let’s just say you don’t have any delusion about who the crowd is there for. Suddenly, what you think is going to be an ego-charged evening becomes sort of humiliating and, if you have any self-awareness at all, you can’t stop thinking about what a fucking jerk you are, because who are you trying to fool?
What I’m saying is that I can’t take it all too seriously. Especially as people are snapping my photo, it’s hard for me not to think, Can’t you see my flaws? I don’t deserve this. I think that’s why I always look the slightest bit awkward in red-carpet photos. I don’t know how to hold my face, and I always have my mouth just slightly open. You’re supposed to pose your leg or hold your jaw in a certain way, but I can’t bring myself to do it. It feels so not me. I’m the one blowing a kiss to photographers, which drives my publicist crazy. It’s a silly move, and my publicist, God bless her, just wants me to be perceived as a serious actress. But even if I attempted to be calculated and glamorous and look like a Hollywood untouchable on the red carpet, someone would catch me picking my nose, so why even pretend? (Can you imagine a photo of Angelina digging for a booger at the Oscars? No. That’s why she really is an untouchable, and I’m me.) There’s a perception that if you take yourself seriously on the red carpet, then the industry in general will take you more seriously. Well, except Jennifer Lawrence. She, to her credit, doesn’t take herself seriously, and is still considered the pinnacle of a serious actress. But she wasn’t in Scary Movie 1, 2, 3, and 4, and she’s the face of Dior. I had a Jergens self-tanning campaign once.