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Unqualified Advice: Squad Goals?

When I was cast in Scary Movie, I called my friend and former college roommate, Claire, to tell her that I landed my first big role. She was thrilled. And then I told her that it was a spoof comedy, and, with a voice full of concern, she said, “But, Anna, you’re not funny.”

It wasn’t mean; it was true.

“I know,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

It’s a very special kind of friend who can verbalize your insecurities in a way that is a show of support rather than a teardown. When Claire reminded me that I wasn’t a comedian, she was saying, “Okay, how should we tackle this?” Not “Man, you’re going to fuck this up.”

I’ve never been the kind of gal who surrounds herself with female friends. I’ve never had that Sex and the City posse—I haven’t met my ladies regularly for brunch or had a group that I just called “the girls.” I always wanted that, but I never knew how to get it, so instead I clung to the man in my life at any given time.

But I do usually have two or three incredibly close girlfriends, and I am fiercely loyal to those people.

For a while, in my twenties, I thought it was cool to say that I was a guys’ girl. I didn’t realize until later how lame I sounded, bragging as though having a lot of girlfriends was a bad thing. Back then I thought that having the approval of my stoner guy friends was of great intellectual value, while friendships with beautiful blond sorority girls would be shameful, so I touted my male friends as if my association with them spoke to how cool I really was. But, like I said, that was lame. I was selling my own gender down the river, and I wasn’t even getting any fulfillment from the relationships with those stoner dudes. The truth of why I didn’t have girlfriends probably had nothing to do with my being a guys’ girl and everything to do with the fact that I was angry and jealous and unduly proud of the guys I was hanging out with.

That said, I did have some precedent for shying away from packs of ladies. Growing up, I fell victim to plenty of mean girls. In fifth grade, for example, I was invited to a girl named Mandy’s house for a slumber party. Mandy was one of the most popular girls in school, and I couldn’t believe I was invited because I was not in her social circle at all. My mom was really skeptical, but I begged her to let me go. She did, and I joined Mandy and her two friends, Lindsey and Amy, and they made fun of me the whole time. “Let’s play boat!” they said when I got there, which I knew was a reference to my ill-fated playdate with Michelle a year earlier. At one point the girls said we should all take a shower together, and they made me close my eyes and I could hear them laughing at my body. It was fifth grade, so I don’t think they were especially developed or anything. Our bodies couldn’t have looked that different from one another. I think I was simply the nerdy girl who liked to play imaginary games and they wanted someone to pick on. I’m sure they invited me to the party for just that reason. (It was so wild to me that my mom totally picked up on what was happening—she knew the party wasn’t a good idea and that these were mean girls. I never told her about what happened, though, because I was too proud. I didn’t want her to be right.) In high school, Mary Young and her crew had a running joke where they would sneak up on me and snap my bra strap. It may sound like a small thing, but when you’re a quiet teenager trying to get through high school unnoticed, that kind of unwanted attention is rough. One day, I went to my locker and the words fuck you, bitch were written across it in permanent marker. It was humiliating. But it was also confusing—I didn’t think I was worthy of that kind of hatred. I generally flew under the radar in school, or at least I tried to. Yes, I did some acting in local theater, and I was in a commercial. I played the chubby kid in a frozen yogurt ad, for which I was paid a $200 gift certificate to Safeway. (I wasn’t really chubby, but I had a weird round face as a kid and the commercial was entirely close up. The script said: “Chubby girl: ‘Mom, are you eating ice cream?’” and I remember one of the producers saying to my mom, “Oh, she’s not chubby, we just call her that because she has a chubby face.”) But at school I primarily focused on how to be as small as possible. The guiding question of my teenage years was simply, How do I survive this time in my life?

I did survive, ultimately. It was rough, and cool was never something I felt, so eventually I accepted my lack of girlfriends and left high school. But years later—twenty, to be exact—I returned.

After graduation, I kept in touch with very few people from high school. Aside from Chad Burke—with whom I lost contact after freshman year of college—there was only Meghan, who was a grade below me and is currently a writer in New York. She was, and is, wonderful and smart and funny, but I think the thing that initially kept us connected was that we both broke out of Edmonds. So when my ten-year high school reunion rolled around, it never even occurred to me to attend. Just before my twentieth, however, some girls from my grade reached out to my older brother on Facebook.

“They’d really like you to come,” Bob told me over the phone. I didn’t want to, quite honestly. Not because I’d have to revisit the mean girls, but because I didn’t keep up with anybody. Was I really going to fly to Edmonds to attend a reunion of people I barely knew and who, a couple of decades earlier, had no interest in me?

Still, it seemed like I’d be sending a complicated message if I didn’t go—I didn’t want it to come off like I thought I was too good for Edmonds—so Chris and our son, Jack, and I took a weekend trip back home. It was 2014. Guardians of the Galaxy had just come out and Chris was at the beginning of megastardom. I told him that I didn’t want to subject him to my reunion, which was true, but I also didn’t want the story to be that “Anna showed up with Chris.” We decided I’d attend alone and he’d pick me up at the end. All those years later, the idea that I would come in and command any type of narrative still made me anxious. High school reunions are strange that way. They tap into so much—who we were, who we’ve become, who we want to be, and how we want to be perceived. So while intellectually I knew that plenty had changed in those twenty years, once I stepped into the school, it didn’t feel that way. I was still awkward and uncomfortable and without any good friends; and the mean girls were still huddled in the corner, and they still seemed pretty mean.

This is where you might be picturing Romy and Michele. You might think that I swooped in and wowed the crowd with how fabulous I’d become in the decades since graduation.

You would be wrong.

It’s true that fame and success have given me more value to some people who otherwise might not want to talk to me. There were a couple of former classmates I chatted with who perhaps wouldn’t have been interested if I hadn’t “made it” in Hollywood. And, honestly, I was surprised, but pleased, by how little satisfaction I got from that. Because while that satisfaction might have been human, it might also have made me a giant asshole.

The truth of the evening was that there was no “I showed them!” I was not the belle of the ball. Mostly, I was snubbed. The same girls who were mean to me when I was eighteen were whispering about me at thirty-eight. But there was something almost comforting in that—not the talking about me so much as the simple knowledge that some things don’t change. Mean girls stay mean. I was perversely happy about it.

There was one person at the reunion who I was looking forward to seeing. My old friend Matt. We had been close in high school. I’d had a big crush on him, and of course he knew it. At the reunion, we caught up and he introduced me to his stunning wife, who was lovely, and then he turned to me and said, “I just want to apologize for being so mean to you.” I knew what he was talking about. Junior year, Matt recorded me talking shit about our mutual friend Jeff. Then he played it for Jeff, just to make me look like a bitch. (I have this theory that we all need to publicize the list of suspects who should be investigated in the event of our murder. If I turn up dead, definitely find out what Jeff was up to.) But when Matt apologized all those years later, it was insulting. Of course I remember how he betrayed me with that recording, and it definitely caused a clear shift in our friendship, but I’d been so excited to see him, and there was so much funny shit he could have referenced from our past instead. It had been twenty years. I was over it. Maybe.

Part of the reason you go to a high school reunion, I think, is to get confirmation that other people remember you as you remember yourself. That night, when former classmates said they recalled me being quiet in high school, it was such a relief, because that’s what I remember, too. So Matt’s apology didn’t feel long overdue or make me feel in any way vindicated. It just stung. That’s what he remembered?! I thought this was someone I had really connected with, and I’d been so eager to see him. The idea that I was reduced to this one moment where he treated me like shit was kind of humiliating. I have this image of Matt and his wife driving to the reunion together and him saying, “Yeah, I was really mean to Anna, so I’m going to apologize tonight,” which I know might be said with the best intentions but just feels gross.

After that interaction, I was done. I’d been at the reunion for all of one hour, but it was long enough for me to feel like I was in high school again, and to be ready to get out. I mean, Green Day was pumping through the loudspeakers. Chris drove down and picked me up, as we’d planned, and it did feel a bit like the lion rescuing the lioness from the hyenas. It was amazing to watch the reaction as he came through the door. I still felt like headgear-wearing, awkward Anna Faris, but when Chris came in, he was all movie star. There was a collective gasp as he whisked me away and, yes, that was fairly satisfying, I guess. I’m human, after all.

It took me longer than it should have to realize just how important female relationships are in my life. That shift only happened fairly recently, maybe in the last three to five years. It takes vulnerability of spirit to open yourself up to other women in a way that isn’t competitive, and that’s especially hard in Hollywood, where competition is built into almost every interaction.

Female actresses don’t get to work together very often, so we truly don’t have a ton of face time with one another, though I do like to think that’s changing. With guys—like Chris and Seth Rogan and James Franco—they’re all buddies and do each other favors and appear in each other’s projects. And of course plenty of women do that, too, but sometimes I’m envious of the communities that male actors can establish merely because there have been historically more roles for men in any given project, so they have more opportunities to forge relationships. I have it on my to-do list to host a monthly boozy brunch with a bunch of actresses and no agenda so we can just hang out. Right now, the only times we see one another are at these crazy high-pressure Hollywood events where you’re all wearing gowns and one of you—not me, but the person I’m talking to—is nominated, so she’s distracted and freaked out and in no mood to get into girl talk. Like Emma Stone or Jessica Chastain or Amy Adams, all those stunning women who I never see until the awards shows at which they are, rightly, being celebrated and I’m busy loading up on champagne-infused complimentary snacks.

But between filming a sitcom and recording a podcast and raising a five-year-old, I bump up against a lot of the same internal struggles that most working moms do. As much as I want to host my boozy brunch, making time for it in my schedule hasn’t been a priority. I can hardly keep up with the friends I already have. My oldest pals constantly give me a hard time for being so bad at texting them back, but that’s because I don’t want to have a texty relationship. I want to spend an hour talking and getting into the good stuff. I don’t have a lot of patience for small talk. I don’t even like the phrase. Why would I want to engage in conversation that people deem small? But that means I don’t text back or pick up a call until I have the time to devote to that person. Which often results in “Are you mad at me?” texts, which just make me want to put off a call even more, because I know the first twenty minutes will consist of apologies instead of conversation.

I’ve heard the suggestion that I don’t need a tight group of girlfriends anyway, because Chris should be my best friend. But I’ve never bought that. The idea that your mate must be your best friend feels to me like an overused mantra that puts unnecessary pressure on your relationship. I really believe that your partner serves one purpose, and each friend serves another. There’s the friend who you confess things to, and the friend with whom you do the listening. Or this is the person I talk to when I’m feeling lonely and sad, and this is the person I talk to about work shit, and this is the friend I’m still in touch with because we grew up together. To be honest, I think the notion of best friends in general is messed up. It puts so much pressure on any one person, when I truly believe it’s okay to have intimacy with different people in different ways. That’s why I’m so glad I never had bridesmaids. It seems like a tradition entirely engineered toward forcing you to rank your friends, and that really bothers me. It just shouldn’t happen, at least not beyond grade school.

Today, I’m lucky to have a handful of women I count as confidantes. Allison Janney, my costar on Mom. My friend Alex, who I met when we worked on The Hot Chick together. Meghan, the friend who got out of Edmonds and writes in New York, and Kate, a dear childhood friend and neighbor who, on paper, I have nothing in common with anymore—at least not from an outsider’s perspective—but who totally gets me because, history. Six months ago I called her and said, “Kate! I was reading this article and I think I have this condition called prosopagnosia, where you are totally face blind and don’t recognize people that you’ve seen before.”

“Oh God, you totally have that,” she said. “Remember that time at the park when you thought your mom was walking across the field and it was really that homeless guy?”

Confirming that I might actually have prosopagnosia, instead of just saying I was crazy, might be the kindest thing she ever did for me.