Top Banana

Anna faris is many things—movie star, tv star, wife, mother, and lately, hugely successful podcast host. One thing she isn’t? Unqualified.

- Darre Franich

ANNA FARIS IS THE LAST PERSON WHO SHOULD host a podcast called Unqualified. She’s a movie star (see: What’s Your Number? and The House Bunny, not to mention a Scary Movie or four) and a TV star (on CBS’ Mom, she goes toe-to-toe each week with her Emmy-lavished costar Allison Janney as barely rehabbed boozehounds struggling upward from rock bottom), and she’s excelled at playing Anna Faris—on Entourage and again in this year’s Keanu, as a stark raving drug-mad version of herself.

So how did the 39-year-old actress wind up hosting a relationship-advice chat show? “I wanted to be a producer again,” Faris explains. “I wanted to have a strong creative outlet for something.” Faris has a history of creating opportunities for herself. She moved to Los Angeles in 1999 after graduating from the University of Washington and quickly picked up work. “I got this s---ty job,” she says. Apologetic, she adds: “It wasn’t a s---ty job.” Then she describes her very s---ty first job. “This horror movie called Lovers Lane. Oh, God. I get gutted. I’m a cheerleader who gets gutted.” But just a year later she’d star in the first Scary Movie, a franchise that made her a household name and kept her busy for the next six years. It also ultimately made Faris fear she was getting pigeonholed as a “comedy spoof person,” despite her brilliant small role in 2003’s Lost in Translation among other film work.