Mention the name Anna Faris and one would most probably get a blank face.
And while most other actors would probably be annoyed and start a tantrum, Anna won’t.
“I don’t get recognized that often but when people do, I get the feeling that they respect the work that I do,” the pretty actress told this writer during an interview two years ago. “I don’t really love being all dressed up, but, I think I need to be a little bit more fabulous.”
This writer first met the actress while covering the junket for the hit comedy spoof Scary Movie 4 in which Faris played the part of Cindy Campbell, the role that made her a recognizable face in the horror spoof genre.
In the years since then, Faris has appeared with Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson in My Super Ex-Girlfriend and in a film by noted American independent filmmaker Greg Arakis called Smiley Face.
Prior to that, she has appeared in the critically-acclaimed Brokeback Mountain — for which she earned $75, and in Just Friends with Ryan Reynolds.
This year, the petite actress stars in one of the funniest and sexiest comedies released this summer in the US. At the film’s pink (yes, pink!) carpet premiere attended by celebrities that included Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher and Bruce Willis, the audience had a laughing fit for an hour and a half!
In Columbia Pictures’ The House Bunny, Faris slips on eight-inch heels and scanty outfits, which she swears (during the interview) wouldn’t fit her anymore, as she portrays Shelley Darlington, a perky Playboy playmate who was unceremoniously cast away from the celebrated Playboy Mansion the morning after her 27th birthday because she was deemed “too” old.
“In Bunny years, you are 57 years old,” she is told.
Homeless and with nowhere else to go, the hapless Playmate finds herself in a sorority house that is home to some of the most unattractive and socially outcast girls in the campus. She becomes the girls’ house mother and starts turning their lives upside down.
Faris, who shares producing credit with Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Production, first started developing the idea of a has-been Playboy Playmate a couple of years ago.
“I was wondering what they become after they have left the mansion. Do they become Adventists? Do they work as a waitress? Do they marry somebody rich? How do they cope?”
Those were the questions the actress had in mind. She first toyed with the idea of a drug-addicted Playmate who returns to her hometown and continues to spiral down toward a destructive end.
Those ideas were killed off immediately after prospects of financing deemed the story not commercially viable.
Then, Faris met with the writers of the hit movie Legally Blonde and through a series of meetings, they developed the role of Shelley and her story of rediscovery after she gets booted out of the mansion and transported to a sorority house.
Her next challenge was to get the look for the part.
“It was a challenge, I took Pilates, I hiked,” she reveals. Her character needed to show her beautiful, perfect figure for most of the movie. In one scene, she reveals her full back side.
She had to spend three hours every day to get into character. “Shelley likes to wear heels and some of the shoes are seven or eight inches high. In fact, there was one scene I couldn’t wear my high heels and it threw me for a loop — I was totally unnerved.”
She didn’t need a trainer to teach her how to walk with those impossibly high heels. “I researched by driving through Hollywood Boulevard,” she jokes.
The actress, who admits that she doesn’t know how to flirt with a guy right, finds her character quite endearing.
Although Shelley teaches the girls how to be cool, cute and popular, for Shelley it’s all about self-confidence. “It’s not just a message for girls, but for everyone learning to accept themselves and love themselves for who they are,” she says. “When we first meet Shelley she may think she’s the hottest girl, but she learns to realize that how you look is not important — it’s about how you look at yourself.”
The actress, who’s a real blonde and a dead-ringer for Goldie Hawn, was also excited to have been allowed to shoot some crucial scenes inside the famed Playboy Mansion itself.
“It’s like a dream come true to shoot in the Mansion,” she says. “And Hugh was so nice.”
Hugh Hefner appears in a cameo as himself.
The House Bunny also features the film debut of Rumer Willis, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis’ daughter. It also stars Tom Hank’s son Colin Hanks, American Idol’s Katharine McPhee and the lead singer of the band The All-American Rejects, Tyson Ritter.