Anna Faris

Anna Kay Faris (born November 29, 1976) is an American actress and podcaster.

Faris was born on November 29, 1976, in Baltimore, Maryland, the second child of Jack, a sociology professor, and Karen Faris, a special education teacher.

Both her parents, natives of Seattle, Washington, were living in Baltimore as her father had accepted a professorship at Towson University.

When Faris was six, the family moved to Edmonds, Washington.

Her father worked at the University of Washington as a vice president of internal communications, and later headed the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association, while her mother taught at Seaview Elementary School in Edmonds.

Faris has an older brother, Robert, who is also a sociologist and professor at the University of California, Davis.

In interviews, she has described her parents as "ultra liberal" and said that she and her brother were raised in an irreligious but "very conservative", traditional atmosphere.

At age six, her parents enrolled her in a community drama class for children, as they usually encouraged her to act.

She enjoyed watching plays and eventually produced her own material in her bedroom with neighborhood friends.

She has said in interviews she often imagined her orthodontal retainer talking to her, and that she pictured herself "on talk shows to talk about [her] talking retainer".

Faris attended Edmonds Woodway High School (where she graduated in 1994), and while studying, performed onstage with a Seattle repertory company and in nationally broadcast radio plays.

She once described herself as "a drama-club dork," and said she used to wear a Christmas-tree skirt in school.

Faris played brief roles in the made-for-TV film Deception: A Mother's Secret and the independent drama Eden, the latter of which screened at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival.

She then attended the University of Washington, where she earned a degree in English literature in 1999.

Despite her love of acting, she admitted she "never really thought [she] wanted to become a movie star" and continued to act "just to make some extra money," hoping one day to publish a novel.

After graduating from college, she was going to travel to London, where she had a receptionist job lined up at an ad agency.

However, she ended up living in Los Angeles "at the last minute," once she committed to the idea of pursuing acting.

Shortly afterwards, she obtained the starring role in Scary Movie. At 22, she lived in a studio apartment at The Ravenswood in Hancock Park.

Encouraged by her parents to pursue acting when she was young, Faris gave her first professional performance at age nine in a three-month run of Arthur Miller's play Danger: Memory! at the Seattle Repertory Theater.

She made US$250 for the role, which was "huge" for her at the time.

"I felt like I was rolling in the dough," she recalled.

She went on to play Scout in a production of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Village Theatre in Issaquah, Washington, the title character in Heidi, and Rebecca in Our Town.

Her theatre credits during that period included productions of Rain, Some Fish, No Elephants, and Life Under Water.

While in high school, Faris appeared in a television commercial for a frozen yogurt brand and in a training video for Red Robin.

Her first major film role came shortly after college, in the independent slasher film Lovers Lane (1999), in which she played an ill-fated cheerleader.

A B-movie, it received a straight-to-DVD release.

Critical reception was mixed, but for her part, Faris garnered her first acting reviews by writers; efilmcritic.com Greg Muskewitz found her the film's "one center of interest".

She rose to prominence for her work in comedic roles, particularly the lead part of Cindy Campbell in the Scary Movie film series (2000–2006).

Faris's breakout role came in 2000 when she starred in the horror-comedy parody film Scary Movie, portraying Cindy Campbell, a play on the character of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in the slasher thriller Scream.

It marked her first starring credit, as she had appeared only in small and supporting parts in theater plays and low-budget features.

For her performance, Faris received nominations for the Breakthrough Female Performance and Best Kiss Awards at the 2001 MTV Movie Awards.

She subsequently reprised her role in Scary Movie 2, released on July 4, 2001.

Her film credits include The Hot Chick (2002), Lost in Translation (2003), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Waiting... (2005), Just Friends (2005), My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), Smiley Face (2007), The House Bunny (2008), What's Your Number? (2011), The Dictator (2012), and Overboard (2018).

On television, Faris had a recurring role as Erica in the final season of the NBC sitcom Friends (2004) and starred as Christy Plunkett in the CBS sitcom Mom (2013–2020).

She has also had voice-over roles in the film series Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009–2013) and Alvin and the Chipmunks (2009–2015), as well as The Emoji Movie (2017).

She found the experience a "great boot camp" for her, as she told UK's The Guardian in 2009, explaining that she "hadn't done much before that. With those movies, you have to be so exact with your props and the physical comedy and everything, so it was a great training ground."

Scary Movie was a major commercial success, ranking atop the box office charts with a US$42 million opening weekend gross.

It went on to earn US$278 million worldwide.

On the latter, she said in May 2012: "I play, like, the perfect hostess. And I think they still use it."

In 2015, Faris launched Unqualified, an advice podcast, and in 2017, her memoir of the same name was published, which became a New York Times Best Seller.