The 2008 movie scene Anna Faris hated shooting: “It was really humiliating”
This year’s reboot of the Scary Movie franchise may not have gone down too well with the critics, but it has done massive numbers at the box office nonetheless, and a big part of that is down to the seemingly endless comic appeal of Anna Faris.
Cinema goers, especially in the US, have shown over the last 25 years or so that they can’t get enough of Scary Movie, the film-parodying franchise based on Scream that has now reached a sixth instalment, and that’s probably how Faris has managed to gross $1.45million at the box office during her career, because she’s been in all of them bar one.
It was the first of the movies, back in 2000, that properly launched her career, in fact, playing the role of Cindy Campbell in the film that perfectly skewered slasher movies on its way to bringing in $278million against a budget of just $19m. Faris credited the Wayans production as being the training ground she needed, and after reprising her role in the hastily arranged sequel the following year, she showed she could do other genres too, first with a horror in 2002’s May and then opposite Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.
That was enough to land her a role on the final season of Friends, and after another Scary Movie and a small role in Brokeback Mountain, she made the first of her mid-2000s comedies that she would become famous for over the next decade, Just Friends with Ryan Reynolds.
The 2005 comedy about a formerly obese student trying to get out of the friend zone with the girl he loves proved a big hit, mostly due to Faris’ performance, and by the time a fourth Scary Movie came around, plus another successful comedy with Uma Thurman titled My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Faris was ready to carry her own major movie.
That came with 2008’s brilliant The House Bunny, the tale of a Playboy bunny who ends up running an unpopular University sorority house that has become a cult favourite and trebled its budget in ticket sales. But much as it was one of Faris’ best performances in a comedy, it came with challenges that she still struggles with looking back on.
She recalled having to film a nude scene for the movie in which her body-confident character strolls around the house with just a towel on her head, saying: “It was my first nude scene, and it wasn’t supposed to be me. I had a body double, and we had some complicating factors with her. It was sort of a last-minute thing, where I said, ‘I’ll just go ahead and do this.'”
Adding: “I was really uncomfortable. This crew that I’d been working with, that knows me when I put on my producer hat, suddenly sees me naked. It was really humiliating.”
Also notable for being an early appearance for Emma Stone, the film opened at number one at the US box office, and Faris’ work was widely praised by the critics. Now, on the back of the latest Scary Movie, Faris will star opposite Robert Pattinson in the thriller Primetime from A24, based on the To Catch a Predator TV show. She’ll also be seen in one of her more traditional comedies, Spa Weekend in August, alongside Isla Fisher.
