Of all the pieces of advice that Anna Faris received while studying drama in college, none resonated more than the time an older actor approached her after yet another failed audition. “Well,” the sympathetic actor began, “if you can do anything else, do it.”

“It was startling for me,” Faris recalls some years later, sprawled out on a posh white couch in an equally posh Hollywood hotel. “I thought, ‘I can do something else! This doesn’t have to be the only thing that makes me happy.’ I quit acting and majored in English. I thought I would go into marketing and advertising.”

Fortunately for her – and for “14-year-old boys everywhere” – Faris’ plan to conquer the business world didn’t quite stick. Though she was frustrated by her lack of success in the acting industry, she chalked it up to geography and bad luck. In her senior year, she decided to make the move from Seattle to L.A., and give her acting dreams one last shot.

“I thought I’d give it a year, work in a restaurant, see what happens,” Faris says. “And I was fortunate enough to get a film right away.”

That film was Scary Movie, a satirical comedy that spoofed the slasher film renaissance of the late nineties. The unexpected hit spawned three sequels – all starring Faris – and established the pretty and petite blonde from Seattle as Hollywood’s newest queen of slapstick. Critics and observers were surprised by her seemingly overnight success, though no one was more astonished than Faris herself, a self-professed “serious kid” who was a late bloomer and grew up hiding in the shadows of her more outgoing family. In her mind, she was anything but funny.

“I was the awkward kid who was short and had braces and looked like I was perpetually 8 years old,” Faris says. “I hated when people laughed at me.”

Slight and self-conscious then, the actress has grown to embrace her comedic roots, though she’s still not convinced she’s as hilarious as people insist. “I consider myself silly and ridiculous sometimes, but not funny,” she says.

As if to prove her point: “A journalist once asked me to tell them a joke,” she sighs, “and I couldn’t think of what to say.”

To read the rest of this article, pick up Issue 8 of Corduroy…

(text: tim chan / image: peter ash lee)