Anna Faris Once Hated Being in This Superhero Movie so Much She Was Glad It Bombed
Outspoken actor Anna Faris didn’t hold back her feelings towards a movie she starred in back in the mid-2000s. In fact, she disliked the film so much that she took joy in it flopping.
Anna Faris co-starred with Uma Thurman in ‘My Super Ex-Girlfriend’
Faris starred as Hannah Lewis in the 2006 superhero comedy film My Super Ex-Girlfriend. The movie focuses on Uma Thurman’s Jenny Johnson as a superpowered crime-fighter dating Luke Wilson’s Matt Saunders. Things take a turn for the worse when Wilson’s character breaks up with Thurman’s. This prompts the superhero to use her powers to humiliate her ex-boyfriend whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Teaming up with Faris was one of the highlights of doing the movie for Thurman. The Kill Bill star asserted that she was already familiar with and enjoyed Faris’ work prior to the two collaborating.
“But I had been a big fan of hers for a number of years, and I thought she has a much broader range than people have given her credit for, and I thought, I believe her as the person who’s working in that architectural office,” she once told IGN. “I think she’s certainly beautiful enough to be attractive to any man. She is your quintessential girl next door. The woman you’d want to bring home to mom. I thought she had the acting chops, even though she’d done mostly broad comedy.”
Anna Faris hated being in ‘My Super Ex-Girlfriend’ so much she was glad it bombed
For Faris, starring in My Super Ex-Girlfriend as a love-interest wasn’t all bad. It gave the Mom star the opportunity to work in an Ivan Reitman movie, who was a director she greatly respected.
“I was really thrilled to work with such a legend, of comedy. And he’s a really, really smart man, and I was honoured. I mean he saw me in stuff and so and offered me that role instead of me fighting for it and auditioning for it, which was a huge honour for me,” she once told Female.
But My Super Ex-Girlfriend didn’t enjoy too much critical or financial success. It took in a modest $61 million at the box-office, and received lukewarm to negative reviews from critics.
But the film’s performance was good news for Faris, who found the movie destructive. Because if there was one thing the actor couldn’t stand, it was movie roles where the female characters only giggled and simpered for the love interest. And it was exactly the kind of role she believed her Hannah ended up being.
“I feel I did that in My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” she once said in an interview with The New Yorker. “These roles are destroying a generation of boys, who think we’ll forgive any kind of assholey behavior.”
Anna Faris once revealed she didn’t want to be considered a role model
Fairs may have felt movies like Super Ex-Girlfriend set a bad example for audiences, but she also wouldn’t consider herself a role-model for her movie roles. When Faris’ mom tried to assert that some looked up to the Scary Movie alum, Faris couldn’t have disagreed more.
“Am I a role model? I did Greg Araki’s film Smiley Face, which is a comedy about a girl that’s really into marijuana. So, naturally, I smoked a lot of weed and my mom was appalled. She was like, ‘You’re a role model.’ I was like, ‘Mom, I am not a role model.’ I sure hope that nobody thinks of me that way. I don’t want to be held to that standard,” she once said in an interview with Parade.
