Interview: Anna Faris, actress

One of a small group of actors improving the lot of women in comedy, Anna Faris can be relied on to be funny on her own terms

RECOGNISING Anna Faris shows your age as reliably as being able to name all the firemen in Trumpton or the vampires in Twilight. At 34, Faris is a star, provided you are part of the young demographic that enjoys bawdy comedies or spattery horror spoofs. According to Faris, Edinburgh is full of such connoisseurs.

“I was in Scotland for New Year a few years back,” she says. “I was with my boyfriend and we were really excited. We had paid, like, a thousand dollars for the entire trip.”

Unfortunately, this was the year that Scotland was hit by the worst storms in more than a decade and all the outdoor events were cancelled. “We were going to stay in our hotel room but ended up going to this bar. I got recognised and we had an amazing night in this crowded bar in the pouring rain surrounded by crazy Scotch people.”

A pretty blonde with huge eyes and a deadpan delivery, Faris has a touch of the Goldie Hawns about her, although Hawn has never done a scene at a gynaecologist’s where her doctor fails to recognise her until she puts her feet in the stirrups. And yet Faris’s new movie, What’s Your Number, is softer, more romantic fare compared with her other comedies to date. Faris plays an aimless singleton who fears that a high number of boyfriends has left her with nothing to show for it.

Hoping to find Mr Right, she excavates her back catalogue, including a nerdy neighbour, a pub-loving Englishman (Martin Freeman) and a very handsome, very gay Washington politician. There are some dubious aspects to the concept and Faris is not unaware of this, thanks to other members of the European press.

“They want to know what the obsession with number is – they don’t care,” she says. “The idea that this number defines your morals is very old-fashioned – and it’s not something I believe, although my mother once said to me, ‘You will be a virgin until you are married.’ So I’m a very disappointing daughter.”

She also doesn’t recommend raking through past partners for future happiness: “I do remember one ex-boyfriend who broke my heart and I stalked him for a while. He’s now living in a van in North California.”

In What’s Your Number, Faris stars alongside Chris Evans, who was in Captain America, a much bigger blockbuster earlier this summer; but even in diluted form, it’s Faris’s comic fearlessness that carries the film. In a movie industry where women are expected to be cutely decorous or glamorously rebellious, Faris is happiest taking pratfalls in The House Bunny, The Hot Chick or Scary Movie. Her laughs may be broad, but as Faris points out – at least she is getting them. Like her sisters-in-comedy – such as Bridesmaids’ Kristen Wiig and 30 Rock’s Tina Fey – Faris says she is frustrated at how guy-centric most movies are: “There aren’t that many scripts out there for women in comedy. And I got tired of getting scripts where the woman is the straight character for the funny guy to bounce off. I wanted to do what the boys do but I’ve had to create projects in order to play the characters I want to play. If you want to pursue comedy, that’s what you have to do.”

Faris produced and starred in both What’s Your Number and The House Bunny. For The House Bunny she teamed up with a group of writers to put a script on the bones of an idea, and then pitched the idea of a former centrefold who emancipates a sorority house of awkward women to studio executives, while dressed as a Playboy bunny. They greenlit the movie, and although the budget was chickenfeed, the film went on to make to make a respectable £40m at the box office.

“I get a lot a satisfaction out of feeling more powerful than being just an actress,” says Faris. “In an industry where you feel like you have no say over so many things, it’s nice to feel like there are a few things that you can control.” She’s also staking a claim for equal opportunities for behaving badly on screen, and has just finished working as the female lead opposite Sacha Baron Cohen on his new film The Dictator.

“He is a genius. When you work with him you never know where a scene is going, because he likes to improvise. It’s exciting but it keeps you on your toes. I love doing comedy. I get to laugh all day and play appalling characters.”

Faris has lived the classic Hollywood story, arriving in town in her early twenties with no experience, no connections, no work. Her first film job was a low-budget horror where she was cast as a cheerleader and disembowelled early on. Drama, rather than comedy, was her goal but when she auditioned for Scary Movie, the director Keenen Ivory Wayans thought her sunny, slightly scattered optimism was ideal for the lead in his horror spoof parodying teen scream queens such as Neve Campbell and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Faris’s first thought was that she would be fired before the end of filming. “I never thought of myself doing comedy, and my college room-mate was aghast that I was cast. She kept saying to me, ‘But you’re not funny.’”

She finished the film, went on to make three more, and credits Wayans for giving a first lesson in her comedy education. On one of her first days on set, she saw one of her co-stars, Shannon Elizabeth, emerging from the make-up van looking radiant, and immediately felt paralysed with insecurity.

“I don’t know if Keenen noticed, but at that moment he leaned over to me and said, ‘You can’t be vain and funny at the same time.’ And he was right. I’ve played a lot of roles that aren’t very flattering, and they do require a lack of vanity. It was a life lesson through all the work that I do.”

Faris was never a comedy nerd. Growing up, she didn’t watch Monty Python reruns or listen to old Steve Martin recordings. She didn’t sneak off to comedy clubs as a teenager or practice her own routines. Nor does she come from funny bones: both her father and brother are sociologists.

“My parents were very strict and didn’t let me watch any movies, and I wasn’t allowed to watch television. Whatever the weather, my brother and I were expected to be outside playing, and I’m grateful that they did that because it forced us to develop our imaginations.”

So how did her parents react to the Scary Movies series, with its broad sex gags and goofy gore?

“I was nervous for them, especially about them seeing some of the raunchier material,” she says, adding with faux-loucheness, “but actually it broke them in for the other movies.”

Mr and Mrs Faris sound like good sports, and I’m not just saying this because Anna’s father often surfs the net for references to his daughter, posting comments if he thinks the copy is unfriendly.

“My mother would like me to play characters who are role models, but my dad tells her, ‘Guys don’t get criticised for playing the villain or the idiot. She should be able to play whomever she wants.’”

Although wedded to comedy for now, Faris has shown that she has the chops for drama in the past. In Brokeback Mountain she was almost unrecognisable as the loud wife of a closeted cowboy who gives Jake Gyllenhaal the glad eye, while her vacant, armpit-sniffing, husband-stealing starlet in Lost in Translation stole scenes from Scarlett Johanssen. When the film came out, it was widely speculated that Faris and her director Sofia Coppola were having a pop at Cameron Diaz. Not so, according to Faris: “Cameron’s name never came up. There was another actress that I’d heard some stories about, and Sofia and I talked about a couple of people – but I feel awful that people thought that I was making fun of Cameron, because I like her.”

Unlike most of her movie characters, Faris is no longer on the singles market. In her twenties she briefly married actor Ben Indra, whom she met while filming that first and last non-comedy horror movie, Lovers’ Lane. In 2008 they divorced and the following year Faris wed actor Chris Pratt, whom she met on the set of Take Me Home Tonight. You may see a pattern here. And yes, she has asked her husband to tot up his Number. Cannily, however, so far he has refused, merely telling her “it’s high.”

But now that she’s married, presumably her own number (“five… hundred thousand!”) won’t be changing. “Probably,” she agrees, thoughtfully. “But you know, this is my first European press junket.”

l What’s Your Number? is in cinemas from Friday.