Anna Faris does not, on any working day of her career, talk about Chris Pratt. The 49-year-old Scary Movie alum has spent the eight years since her 2018 divorce from the Guardians of the Galaxy star saying as little on record about the breakup as a celebrity-press cycle has ever allowed. This week, ahead of Scary Movie 6’s $55-million-opening box-office run, Faris broke the run — for one paragraph, in a Variety profile, in service of a story about her podcast.
The paragraph, by Variety’s own framing, was the headline of the entire profile. Anna Faris Is Unqualified, the celebrity-advice podcast Faris launched in 2015 and now produces independently with iHeart, was, she told the trade, “the project that made me feel like I could keep doing this.” The 2018 divorce, by her own account in the same interview, made her want “a life without public judgment” — and the podcast became, paradoxically, the public-facing way she built it.
“I was feeling sad,” Faris told Variety, in the line that became the entire weekend’s celebrity-press cycle. “The podcast made me feel like there was a place where I could just be myself and talk to people who were also figuring things out. It was a secret community I got to build at a time I really, really needed one.” The line, by Sunday morning, had been picked up by Hello, Just Jared, Yahoo Entertainment and AOL.
According to Hello magazine’s reading of the Variety interview, Faris spent the post-divorce period of 2018 and 2019 “intentionally building a life that did not need Hollywood’s calendar.” She moved to a smaller house. She narrowed her acting work to two projects a year. She began producing more of Anna Faris Is Unqualified herself rather than handing the editing to her network. She also went back to therapy, which she has discussed openly on the podcast since 2019.
The Variety interview that produced the line was itself anchored by the Scary Movie 6 cycle. Faris is now in the middle of a $55-million-opening franchise comeback for Paramount, having reprised her Cindy Campbell role for the first time since 2006. The same interview included the Melania-Trump scene that got cut. Faris’s comments on the divorce occupy, by Variety’s own design, the profile’s emotional midpoint.
Faris has, by her own confirmation, no plans to write a memoir, sit for a long-form documentary, or appear on a podcast tour to talk about the divorce. The Anna Faris Is Unqualified format — forty minutes, two co-hosts, one celebrity guest per episode — will, she told Variety, remain her one public-facing channel. “It is the only place I want to do this,” she said. “And I do not even do it often there.”
According to AOL’s recap of the interview, Pratt’s representatives have not commented. The actor, who married Katherine Schwarzenegger in 2019, was in Atlanta on Saturday for Guardians of the Galaxy 4 reshoots. He has not addressed the Variety piece on social media. Faris’s nine-year-old son Jack Pratt, who Faris and Pratt share custody of, was photographed with both parents in the same week. The custody arrangement, both have repeatedly emphasised, is the part of the post-divorce life they have both committed to keeping out of the press.
For Faris, the wider career picture has, since 2018, been about a deliberate downshift. The post-divorce 49-year-old has appeared in three films and one limited series. She has hosted, by her own count, 437 episodes of Anna Faris Is Unqualified. She has lived in the same Los Angeles neighbourhood for seven years. The Variety profile, by the trade’s own writeup, is the longest single-interview Faris has sat for since 2017. The takeaway, in her own line: “I built a life. The work made it possible. The podcast made it bearable.”
