Anna Faris is a work in progress.
The actor, 45, recently opened up in an interview with Chelsea Handler on Handler’s podcast, Dear Chelsea, about her life post-divorce and how she’s “still learning” how to accept love in her life.
“Being a stepmom… I’m still learning. I really am,” she explained of co-parenting her new husband Michael Barrett’s two children, which he has from a previous relationship. “I felt at first I wanted to be kinda like this wild, new, reckless person in their lives, because I was also going through a divorce.”
Faris married cinematographer Barrett in 2021, after meeting him on the film Overboard.
Previously, she was married to Chris Pratt, before they divorced In October 2018. She and Pratt share a son, Jack, 9. Before Pratt, she was married to actor Ben Indra until their divorce in 2008.
When reflecting about how her separation from Indra changed her perspective on life, Faris acknowledged, “there is this kind of shift that happens” post-divorce.
“It hit hard the first time,” she explained. “I turned into somebody I didn’t recognize. Like, I was always the kinda person that had my fridge filled — and I hosted a lot of dinners. That was back when I had friends. But then [post-divorce] I found myself in this apartment with just beer and mustard in the fridge, and I was going out all the time. I had no one to text or call to say, ‘Hey, can I do this?’ It was incredibly liberating, and I reverted back to, like, when I was 17 years old.”
When speaking of the intimate relationship she has with herself now, Faris admits it’s a “slow growth” when it comes to accepting love from others — which she can trace back to her childhood.
“I was terrified that I wasn’t a good lover, especially when I was younger,” she said. “I was so self-conscious of my body. I didn’t want anybody to see it, but I would dance on the edges of it. I wanted to be desired desperately.”
“My mom never complimented my physical appearance,” she explained. “I was such a late bloomer — I had chubby cheeks, I wore headgear for f****** years. I think my parents did that to me because they wanted me to stay a virgin,” adding, “that was one of the struggles in my life for sure.”
Faris’s eagerness to please people, combined with a craving to be desired by men, inspired her to make changes to her body to meet those needs.
“I just got fake boobs and bleached my hair. That was my strategy,” she said, adding that while it’s easy for her to accept compliments about her work and accomplishments, it’s still a struggle accepting praise about her appearance. “In Hollywood, if you’re at a thing and everybody looks beautiful and someone is like ‘I think you look so beautiful,’ I can’t absorb that very well. It’s a little too much.”
Following her second divorce, however, Faris says “it’s been easier” to accept love, though adds, “I still kinda struggle with it.”
While Faris is still learning the ups and downs of being a stepparent, she’s also been open about the realities of coparenting with Pratt. Earlier this year, on her podcast Unqualified, she spoke openly about the difficulties.
“Chris and I work really hard [to coparent] because we have Jack,” she said. “That is sort of the long game idea and making sure Jack is really happy, which makes us really happy. We have sort of the luxury of circumstance. You know, we are both in other loving relationships, but it’s like, how do you not, in general, sink into a place of bitterness?”
Although she admits that raising a child with her ex has its challenges, at the end of the day, she wishes everyone the best.
“I do want to reiterate though, that I f**king acknowledge, we all do, everyone acknowledges, that there’s bitterness and pain with all breakups, and that hopefully makes us more human,” she explained. “But the long game, and it’s just the worst being the bigger person. It just is. It f**king sucks! Until then, what [matters most] is that everyone’s happy.”
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