Anna Faris couldn’t recognize herself after divorce
The 45-year-old performer recently spoke candidly about her life after divorce on Chelsea Handler’s podcast, Dear Chelsea, where she said that she is “still learning” to embrace love.
“Being a stepmom… I’m still learning. I really am,”. She went on to say, “I am really co-parenting Michael Barrett’s two kids 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.”
After working together on the film Overboard, Faris and cinematographer Barrett eventually tied the knot in 2021.
She filed for divorce from Chris Pratt in October of 2018. Jack, her 9-year-old son, is the child of her relationship with Pratt. She was formerly married to Ben Indra, another actor, from 1998 until their 2008 divorce.
Faris said, “there is this kind of shift that happens” after getting divorced from Indra, describing how her outlook on life shifted.
“It hit hard the first time,” she said. “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.”
Faris says she had a “slow growth” in receiving affection from people, something she can trace back to her upbringing, which led to the development of the close connection she has with herself now.
“I was terrified that I wasn’t a good lover, especially when I was younger,” she remarked. “As the speaker puts it, “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.”
Since Faris wanted so badly to be liked by others and to attract men’s attention, she altered her appearance to achieve those goals.
“I just got fake boobs and bleached my hair. That was my strategy,” she explained, adding that she finds it far simpler to accept comments on her job and achievements than on her beauty.“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.”
Even while Faris thinks she has a better time accepting love since her second divorce, she admits, “I still kind of struggle with it.”
Faris has been candid about the challenges she and Pratt have as parents, even as they navigate the challenges of stepparenthood. She addressed the challenges head-on in an episode of her podcast, Unqualified, released earlier this year.
“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?”
Raising a child with an ex-spouse is not easy, but she hopes for the best for everyone involved.
“I do want to reiterate though, that I fuking acknowledge, we all do, everyone acknowledges, that there’s bitterness and pain with all breakups, and that hopefully makes us more human,” she said. “But the long game, and it’s just the worst being the bigger person. It just is. It fking sucks! Until then, what [matters most] is that everyone’s happy.”
