Unqualified

by Anna Faris

As my mom keeps reminding me, I do have a degree in English from the University of Washington,

I’m an actor, and have been since I was nine, so I should point out that I have been hiding behind characters and other people’s words for a long time.

In 2011, I naively and arrogantly agreed to be the subject of a profile in the New Yorker. It was written over the course of six months and when the fact-checker called me a few weeks before publication to read my own words back to me—words that I had spoken and completely forgotten—I knew I had to leave the country for good. My own vanity was about to destroy all I had worked for in Hollywood. Ultimately that didn’t happen, but I did have to make a couple of apologetic phone calls.

I haven’t used a computer properly ever, in my entire life. When you have a job where you make faces and say other people’s words, you don’t have to learn technology.

I’m fascinated by other people’s relationships. In fact, I’m fascinated by other people’s lives. What they ate for dinner, who they slept with last night; it’s all equally interesting to me. And while I don’t like to butt in, I do love to offer helpful, if sometimes unsolicited, wisdom. (That’s butting in, isn’t it? I’m the worst. I’m a horrible person.)

Heartbreak and rejection are communal.

giving advice and hearing other people’s stories is better than therapy. Not that I’m in therapy. I probably should be, but I find it too frustrating to not know anything about the person I’m talking to.

If your closest friends stop showing up to your barbecues, you’re probably in a bad relationship. And if you opt for kindness over teasing, you’re probably in a good one.

All odds were against me—I shouldn’t say that, because I’m a blond white American person—but when it came to Anna versus Michelle, there was no comparison in the eyes of the elementary schoolers.

I was the short girl who wore a sheepskin coat to her first day of school; Michelle had a fountain in her house.

But remembering the pain is a good thing, because all those experiences that you can’t close the door on make you a more empathetic person, and that should be embraced.

So don’t date musicians, except maybe a classical one. Second-chair oboe. I would stay away from first chair. And definitely not a conductor.

I was crazy for Chad. He was just so hot and angry, which were my only two requirements in a man back then,

It’s a very special kind of friend who can verbalize your insecurities in a way that is a show of support rather than a teardown.

For a while, in my twenties, I thought it was cool to say that I was a guys’ girl. I didn’t realize until later how lame I sounded, bragging as though having a lot of girlfriends was a bad thing.

The truth of why I didn’t have girlfriends probably had nothing to do with my being a guys’ girl and everything to do with the fact that I was angry and jealous and unduly proud of the guys I was hanging out with.

I still felt like headgear-wearing, awkward Anna Faris, but when Chris came in, he was all movie star. There was a collective gasp as he whisked me away and, yes, that was fairly satisfying, I guess. I’m human, after all.

It takes vulnerability of spirit to open yourself up to other women in a way that isn’t competitive, and that’s especially hard in Hollywood, where competition is built into almost every interaction.

Female actresses don’t get to work together very often, so we truly don’t have a ton of face time with one another, though I do like to think that’s changing.

sometimes I’m envious of the communities that male actors can establish merely because there have been historically more roles for men in any given project, so they have more opportunities to forge relationships.

I’ve heard the suggestion that I don’t need a tight group of girlfriends anyway, because your partner should be your best friend. But I’ve never bought that. The idea that your mate must be your best friend feels to me like an overused mantra that puts unnecessary pressure on your relationship.

I think the notion of best friends in general is messed up. It puts so much pressure on any one person, when I truly believe it’s okay to have intimacy with different people in different ways.

You Can’t Take It With You, a Pulitzer Prize–winning play in which I played Essie Carmichael. It was a juicy part. Not the lead, but a good, meaty role that allowed me to show off my acting chops. (I love beef references, dear reader.)

I don’t know how Kyle could stand kissing me after I vomited, but we made out a little bit and then he fingered me right there in that king-size hotel bed for three. (In hindsight, maybe Jeff is right to want to murder me.)

I wasn’t really in it for the sexual pleasure. I was just head over heels for this guy, and at the time I thought if I was going to keep a man I had to give him my pussy over lunchtime at his parents’ house.

For a long time, I had incredibly low expectations of men, and I felt so smug every time a guy proved me right.

A person is willing to put up with a lot when they’re just so grateful for the attention.

“Oh, Annie,” she said. (My mom calls me Annie, rhymes with Connie.) “You can’t do that movie. You are a role model!” She was so disappointed, but I had to explain to her—I wasn’t a role model. I was known for a movie in which I got sprayed to the ceiling with cum.

Despite their one fourteen-minute interview on Anna Faris Is Unqualified, my parents don’t listen to the podcast. I sort of told them not to, and they sort of don’t know how to, and I’m sort of grateful that they don’t.

No one can expect to be completely happy 100 percent of the time, but if you’re spending the majority of a relationship feeling like crap because of the other person, that probably means something.

I called Ben and told him over the phone that I was leaving him, and then went to set and was like, “Hey, everybody! I just left my husband.” Pretty soon I was knocking on Chris’s door and was basically like, “Hi. I’m ready to get boned.”

In the moment after I broke the news to the cast and crew, Chris and I exchanged a brief glance, and we both knew what it meant.

I take pride in not being a high-maintenance person, which is probably exactly the kind of thing a high-maintenance person would say.

I’m too proud to play the damsel in distress. Instead I eat a half-dead fly and then I’m like, “Wanna make out?”

I didn’t have the language to actually be romantically savvy. I would say, “Do you want to go out with me?” And when the guy said, “What?” I’d say, “What about your friend?”

I thought Chris wasn’t calling me his girlfriend intentionally. That he was being noncommittal. But it was more that we weren’t being social. We never did anything where the opportunity to call me his girlfriend presented itself. We were just having sex and making each other food all the time.

Chris Evans is a gem.

The reality is that I bite my nails and have giant knuckles and they’re basically German-immigrant potato-farming hands. The only benefit of my hands is that they’re small. And they make penises look big.

Looking back now, I wish I had slept with more people, simply so I could learn to be a better lover and know how to tackle more positions and make better noises.

I wish I could have been like, “I am woman! I own this shit.” But I just couldn’t. I did not own that shit.

If you haven’t already picked up on this, I do a lot of weird shit for no other reason than to entertain myself.

Unfortunately, like so many things, it got ruined by rampant penises.

The magic of Chatroulette was short-lived. The site pretty quickly turned into a sea of men masturbating, which was disappointing. These men were too cowardly to show their faces, of course, so the camera would just land on their dicks.

I was so confused when Chatroulette became a forum for guys to show off their penises. I can’t imagine any scenario in which I would enjoy filming a close-up of my vagina or getting off on somebody else looking at it. I just don’t understand the arrogance of “look at this swollen member.”

Eventually I stopped using Chatroulette. Because of the dicks, sure, but also because I came home from New Zealand and I wasn’t so lonely anymore. I wasn’t desperate for someone to talk to, so I could connect in person rather than traveling to a basement in Lithuania. But also, the dicks.

I’d never taken care of an infant before, and the nursing staff was a great support system. They were also, in a wonderful way, very practical. They didn’t give me any sympathy, and instead were totally direct. Here’s what you’ll have to do; here’s how to do it.

It also helped that those nurses tossed Jack around like he wasn’t the superdelicate little guy he appeared to be. Their nonchalance about his tinyness made me feel good in a weird way. It was like, Oh, they don’t seem fazed at all, maybe it’s not so bad.

Be selfish in love is a kinder phrase for “He’s a fucking dick; you’ve got to get out before you marry this person.” Protect your heart is a kinder phrase for “He’s using you.”

That’s not to say I’m necessarily respectful of people’s privacy, I just want to hear their business from their own mouths.

In the end, I hope that it has made some people laugh and made other people feel like they’re not crazy, or at least that they’re just as crazy as I am so they know they’re not alone.