Unqualified

Be Kind. Be Polite. Be Grateful. My husband and I have been together for 7 years and this has been our mantra. We always say please and thank you to each other.

  —Camryn

  The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.

  —Jennifer

  Think of a relationship like a bank. Sometimes you make deposits, sometimes you make withdrawals. If one person is always making the deposits and the other is always making withdrawals, the person making deposits eventually runs out. It’s rarely, if ever, split 50/50, but both partners need to make deposits as frequently as they withdraw.

  —Brianne

  You are not the exception to the rule, you are the rule. Just because Susie has a sister whose boyfriend’s 3rd cousin’s fiancé got his shit together for her and they lived happily ever after doesn’t mean they all will.

  —Nicole

  Don’t judge them by what they say, judge them by what they do.

  —Daphne

  You can’t change your partner, you can only change yourself. By continually learning about yourself and becoming more aware of your words/actions and how they may affect the other person, you will be able to change the things that you have control over and eventually your partner (or other side of the relationship) will change themselves by reaction to your improvements. You only have control over yourself.

  —Dany

  I say DO go to bed angry. Much better to come at it with a refreshed rational brain in the morning . . . especially because the tequila has probably worn off by then.

  —Laura

  What I’ve learned is that no two relationships are the same. So protect your heart by just doing what’s right for you, and don’t worry about what everyone else is doing.

  —Sarah

  Give yourselves the opportunity to miss each other. Obviously spending time together is great, but I think it’s really important to not lose sight of who you are as a person aside from being part of the couple.

  —Samantha

  People in good relationships never stop doing things for each other. Not necessarily big things, but little things. Like scraping their windshield on a frosty morning, starting the coffee machine so it will be ready when they get up, making their favorite dessert or even leaving a little love note somewhere they will come across it.

  —Tammy

  Forty

  I just turned forty. I didn’t think about it much beforehand, because I’m not a birthday person, but aging is such a hot topic in Hollywood that simply surviving another year makes news, especially if you’re entering a new decade. That’s major. Breaking! Anna Faris had a birthday, again! Didn’t she just have one last year? Yup! But this is the big 4-0!

  (Part of my ambivalence about my birthday has to do with the actual date. November 29. Growing up in Washington, November is the gloomiest, most depressing time of the year, and my birthday always falls right after Thanksgiving, so everyone is sick of their families. Chris, on the other hand, has the perfect birthday. June 21. It’s the summer solstice, school is just out, and everyone is getting ready for summer and celebrating. He just seems like the summer birthday type, doesn’t he?)

  The most annoying thing about turning forty has most definitely been when people say “Ooooh, the big 4-0.” I just don’t understand what that means. Am I supposed to be embarrassed? To feel different? It seems like one of those things that is a bigger deal to other people than it is to me, so perhaps I’m not honoring it enough on my end. There’s an implication that I’m supposed to be freaking out. But I just don’t feel old.

  I also don’t think I look particularly old, but I don’t really know what that means, either. It’s always odd when somebody says “Oh my God, you don’t look forty,” and then they throw out another number. Sometimes it’s crazy—“You look like you’re twenty-three!”—but more often I’ll get “You don’t look forty, you look thirty-seven,” and I just don’t know how to take that. I know it’s meant as a compliment, so I guess I’m grateful, but it’s also confounding. First of all, in what ways do a forty-year-old and thirty-seven-year-old look different? Are those the key years where wrinkles and general old-bagginess set in? And why is that a thing we’re supposed to say to each other? Whenever someone mentions that they’re thirty-five or forty or fifty, we automatically default to a compliment that is basically just, “You look great for your decrepit, raggedy age!” What is that about?

  I don’t want to paint a perfect, or perfectly enlightened, picture around age. There are things about getting older that make me feel crappy, and then I in turn feel crappy about feeling crappy. I’m getting spider veins on the sides of my knees and I’ve been dyeing my hair for so long that I probably have a head full of grays and don’t even know it. Articles seem to note that Chris is younger than me, as if that’s a robbing-the-cradle sort of thing because I’ve got a whopping three years on him. I used to have a cute butt, and now it sags to my knees. I wear sweatpants and boots and grubby T-shirts to work because I rehearse all day, so I constantly have to squash the catcalls. “I don’t want anybody telling me how sexy I am today, guys,” I’ll explain to the crew. “It’s too much, I can’t handle it.”

  Despite the spider veins and the maybe-gray hair, the only time I’ve truly felt old since I turned forty was when I went to the doctor. “You’re not twenty, you’re forty,” she reminded me as she took my blood pressure. “Stop thinking you’re twenty.” Coming from a doctor, that’s the moment when you’re like, Okay, fair point. So maybe the biological clock part reminds me that I’m not as young as I used to be.

  • • •

  There’s also the whole “aging in Hollywood” thing. (Excuse me while my eyes glaze over. . . .) In a recent Washington Post article titled WHY THE AGE OF 40 IS SO IMPORTANT IN HOLLYWOOD, the first line reads: “Hollywood is a harsh place for women who dare to age.” The article goes on to explain that three-quarters of leading roles for females go to women under forty. The depressing part about this article (because apparently that wasn’t the depressing part) is that the research shows that Hollywood isn’t really changing. “Even as women have become vastly more visible in the workplace, the hiring patterns in Hollywood seem to be stuck in the 1960s,” the author explains.

  When I got to Hollywood in the late nineties, everyone was lying about their age. Now there’s a law that you can’t even ask actors about their age, which is a little bit ridiculous. Especially since, in this social media world, you can’t really get away with keeping your age quiet. I have generally taken the opposite approach. I talk about my age all the time, especially on the podcast. I guess I feel like the best way to get control over it is by simply owning it. Otherwise your age feels like the elephant in the room. (That said, I make a concerted effort not to ask our female callers their age. Even if it seems relevant to their question, I don’t want other women to get sucked into the time-frame shit we’ve all had to deal with forever.) Am I scared of getting older? Sometimes, sure. Am I scared of people saying I don’t look as good as I used to? Fuck yeah. Would I like to have been born in 1992? Okay, I would. But I’ve got plenty of other things to be grateful for.

  I’ll be honest: it doesn’t feel great to work really hard for nearly twenty years in this town and then worry you won’t get hired again because you’re no longer fuckable. I would like to think that women want to see a man and a woman of a similar age having a romance. In a moment of insecurity, I have definitely asked Chris: “As you have more and more influence in casting your movies, will you think about someone closer to Rachel McAdams’s age?” (She’s thirty-eight.) Because today, it’s still completely usual to have a fifteen-year difference and nobody bats an eye. As long as the man is the older one, that is.

  But I’m not without hope. After a couple of decades in which Hollywood casted quite young, I feel a shift, regardless of what that article says. I’m suddenly getting really nice offers and I like to think that’s because of the strength
of women at the box office. There are a lot of highly accomplished actresses in my age range who continue to work and act and carry movies. And I do think that simply because I’ve hung in the game for so long, people realize that I’m not going anywhere. So they think, We can’t get rid of her, might as well work together on some shit. That’s been one of the perks of comedy, too. It allows for women to have longevity. I won’t be the leading lady always—I’ll become the auntie and the stepmom and mom and then maybe grandma. I’ll do all the normal transitions, but if people will still hire me, then I don’t mind that shift. There’s a lot of liberation in playing supporting characters and not the lead.

  Age is also less limiting in today’s Hollywood world because actors have the ability to do other creative things. Performers who are ambitious can figure out other avenues: writing or teaming up with a producing partner or writing books or doing podcasts. Seth Rogan and his team are a perfect example of that thought process. Okay, if they’re not going to hire me, how do I generate my own material? It’s what happened to me with The House Bunny. I thought, I’m not sure where my next opportunity will come, so maybe I should just create it. And so I developed a film about a lovable Playboy Bunny house mom.

  • • •

  There have been some joys in aging. One of the greatest gifts about getting older has been developing a newfound confidence. I feel more comfortable in my skin, and thus more comfortable being self-deprecating and boisterous at the same time. In my twenties, I felt a constant need to prove myself, so any time I was the butt of the joke—even when it was my own doing—I would simultaneously try to remind everyone to take me seriously.

  Back then, I hadn’t quite figured out what it meant to be a leader, either. I wanted to harness the power I was given on the sets where I was in a prominent position, but I didn’t know how to do it right. It actually took Keenen Ivory Wayans delivering a bit of a wake-up call for me to realize how and when to pick my battles. While we were working together on Scary Movie 2, there was a stunt coordinator on set who was really hard on all our stunt performers. I had become friends with all of them and they would complain to me about this guy all the time. He worked them incredibly long hours and didn’t seem to care about their injuries, and I felt like I potentially had the power to stand up for them. They didn’t ask me to do this, but I approached Keenen, who was the creator and director of the movie. “He’s been mean and cruel and abusive to the stunt people, and I don’t like it,” I said. These were people I was rehearsing with every day, it wasn’t a group of people I saw for only, like, twenty minutes every now and then. I wanted to fight for them.

  “You know what,” Keenen said. “I think this is your battle.” I was a little stung by that, but I also remember thinking that now if I didn’t go to this guy Keenen would know that I was being wimpy and just running to the daddy figure on set. And so the next day I asked the stunt coordinator if we could talk after lunch. My heart was pounding and I was so nervous (not sure if you know this by now, but confrontation is not my strong suit), but we went for a walk and I said awkwardly, “I feel like you can be really mean to some of the people you work with, and I think you may not realize that I feel it but I do. I really like you and respect you but I’m not sure what else to do at this point.” It was one of my first adult conversations and he was awesome about it, thanking me for coming to him and seemingly taking what I said to heart.

  Now that I’m reflecting on it, Keenen and this guy were pretty good friends, so maybe he was warned ahead of time. “Anna’s going to come to you and say you’re mean,” Keenen probably said. “Be sweet to her.” But he was sweet, and it taught me an important lesson. I was looking to Keenen to be my defender and protector, even though I wasn’t the one who needed protecting. I just wanted to assert my power, because I was twenty-three and didn’t know better. The stunt coordinator, on the other hand, was in his mid-thirties, and I was definitely a little intimidated by him. In hindsight, it was a conversation that probably wasn’t mine to have. While he worked me hard and did a lot of training with me to get me in shape, he was never rude to me personally. It was just that I heard from people who were becoming my friends about how cruel he was, and I felt I had the power to make a change.

  I don’t know how I would handle that situation today, because I’m not sure it was my battle to fight back then, and I don’t like to pick a fight just to pick a fight. But I’m grateful to have had that uncomfortable conversation, because those talks are part of growing up, whether it’s about leaving your agent or talking to your director or costar or something else completely unrelated to Hollywood. There are many degrees of confrontation that I haven’t always known how to navigate in a way that is practical but also forceful enough to ensure I’m heard.

  Today, I approach my on-set leadership role very differently. I consider it to be largely my responsibility to create an air of positivity among everyone working on Mom. I have a routine on set every Friday, before we tape the show, where I make an announcement to the crew. Now that we’re in season five, they all laugh before I even start talking because they know what I’m going to say. It goes something like this: “Hey, everybody, I have an announcement. I just want to tell you guys all how much I love you and what an amazing team we are. You are the best. I feel so lucky that I get to drive to work knowing that I’m going to see you.” It’s literally the same exact four sentences every week. It sounds so minor, but I would never have thought to do that in my twenties. It wouldn’t have occurred to me because I was too self-absorbed to turn the spotlight on other people, and I wasn’t comfortable enough in a leadership position to realize that I could use it to establish a positive atmosphere. Plus, I would have worried that everyone was thinking, Who is this young kid telling us she loves us? I took myself seriously, because I wanted other people to do the same. Now that I’m older, I know that speech may be stupid, but at least I can own it and laugh at myself. Why not spread the love, even if it means that I come across as an idiot?

  And I do like spreading the love. I think I was always a nice person but I’ve become more overtly kind as I’ve aged. I feel more generous. Some people see that as being a pushover, and in some cases my aversion to drama is perceived as weakness, which seems like a weird reaction. People have asked me why I don’t stand up for myself more often. But I do when I feel the need to, I just don’t feel that need very often. And, in Hollywood, “standing up for yourself” is often code for making unreasonable demands and generally being a diva. I don’t need my kale pear juice freshly squeezed and hand-delivered to me every morning, I can get my own juice. That doesn’t seem like something that warrants a fit.

  There’s so much childish coddling of actors in our industry—there’s a pattern where actors are treated like children, and therefore behave like children, and that’s why there are eight people whose job it is to literally track where we are at all times. It’s crazy, because you’d think an adult would know how to be where they’re supposed to be, on time, or how to hold their bladder when necessary or be hungry for a minute without needing immediate attention. I know I’m supposed to be on set at 9:00 A.M., and so I should be on set at 9:00 A.M., and someone shouldn’t have to knock on my door and say, “Hey, we’d like to invite you to set now.” Those are the actual words they use in Hollywood, no matter what you’re filming: “We’d like to invite you to set.” It’s kind of ridiculous. So I don’t think the fact that I don’t need everything on demand makes me a pushover, I think it makes me a self-sufficient adult.

  A common theme of hitting a certain age, especially among women, is the tendency—or at least the desire—to be a bit tougher and give up on the people pleasing. But the reality is that I struggle with being a people pleaser, and I don’t think that’s something I can change in myself. I like to think I’m shifting away from the constant need to be liked, but sometimes I enjoy doing things because they will make other people happy. I want to give a compliment just because
I do, not because I’ll get anything in return. Which isn’t to say I’m not vain and I don’t love hearing nice things said about me—of course I am and of course I do. But giving other people small moments of pleasure, I get a kick out of it.

  Looking back at my thirties, they were definitely a time of great growth and an influx of confidence and happiness—I married Chris and had Jack and joined Mom and started my podcast. It felt like my career had a different kind of resurgence, one that I actually had some control over, with movies like The House Bunny and What’s Your Number? My twenties were about projects like Scary Movie and The Hot Chick, in which I had zero creative input. I was along for somebody else’s ride. But in my thirties, I got to have more creative control, or maybe it was just that I was more proactive and people took me more seriously. I don’t know, but it was great. So I hope that in my forties I get to continue on that path. I’d like to produce more, too, so I’m hoping that those doors will open and interesting roles will present themselves as well.

  But more interesting than my forties, I think, is thinking about when I’m sixty and imagining what that looks like. I’d like to live in Washington and I’ll have built a little amphitheater—well, John the artist down the street will have built it, but I’ll have cheered him on—and have a grumpy pet pony who bites sometimes but loves me anyway. And I’ll channel Annette Bening, who is the most stunning almost-sixty-year-old in existence. My strategy will be to fake it till I make it and just be brimming with sexual confidence. I’ve got twenty years to get there.

  Unqualified Advice: How to Tune Out the Noise

  One of the most common issues that Sim and I hear from callers into the podcast has to do with dealing with outside pressure—to get married, to have a kid, to have a second kid, whatever it is. We had one caller, Bree, who had recently finished her PhD. She was the only person in her family to graduate college, let alone to get an advanced degree, and she was also a successful dance teacher. But all Bree’s husband’s family cared about, she said, was whether she was going to have a baby. She and her husband—who happened to be her high school sweetheart—had agreed they didn’t want kids, but the incessant questions from her in-laws were pissing her off, and making her question her husband’s happiness in their marriage.