Does Anna Faris Have Kids?

The Short Answer

Anna Faris is 49 years old — born on November 29, 1976. That makes Anna Faris one of the most-searched public figures for age-related questions, with fans regularly looking up birthday and family details.

Anna Faris: Early Life and Background

Anna Kay Faris ( AH-nə FARR-is; born November 29, 1976) is an American actress, comedian, producer, writer, podcaster, and author. She rose to prominence for her comedic roles, particularly the lead part of Cindy Campbell in the Scary Movie films (2000–present). Her films as a leading actress have grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide.

Faris' film credits include May, The Hot Chick (both 2002), Lost in Translation (2003), Brokeback Mountain, Just Friends (both 2005), My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), Smiley Face (2007), The House Bunny (2008), What's Your Number? (2011), The Dictator (2012), and Overboard (2018). She also had voice-over roles in the film franchises Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009–2013) and Alvin and the Chipmunks (2009–2015).

On television, Faris played the recurring role of Erica in the tenth and final season of the NBC sitcom Friends (2004) and the co-lead of Christy Plunkett in the CBS sitcom Mom (2013–2021). Outside of acting, she created and hosted the advice podcast Unqualified (2015–2023). She wrote a 2017 memoir of the same name, which became a New York Times Best Seller.

Early life and education

Career and Rise to Fame

Faris was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 29, 1976, the second child of Jack, a sociology professor, and Karen Faris, a special education teacher. Both her parents, natives of Seattle, Washington, were living in Baltimore as her father had accepted a professorship at Towson University. When Faris was six, the family moved to Edmonds, Washington. Her father worked at the University of Washington as a vice president of internal communications, and later headed the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association, while her mother taught at Seaview Elementary School in Edmonds.

Faris has an older brother, Robert, who is a sociologist (as was her great-grandfather Ellsworth), currently a professor at the University of California, Davis. In interviews, she has described her parents as "ultra liberal" and said that she and her brother were raised in an irreligious but "very conservative", traditional atmosphere. At age six, her parents enrolled her in a community drama class for children, as they usually encouraged her to act. She enjoyed watching plays and eventually produced her own material in her bedroom with neighborhood friends. She has said in interviews she often imagined her orthodontal retainer talking to her, and that she pictured herself "on talk shows to talk about [her] talking retainer".

Faris attended Edmonds Woodway High School. While studying, performed onstage with a Seattle repertory company and in nationally broadcast radio plays. She once described herself as "a drama-club dork," and said she used to wear a Christmas-tree skirt in school. She graduated in 1994. She attended the University of Washington, where she earned a degree in English literature in 1999. Despite her love of acting, she admitted she "never really thought [she] wanted to become a movie star" and continued to act "just to make some extra money," hoping one day to publish a novel. After graduating from college, she was going to travel to London, where she had a receptionist job lined up at an ad agency. However, she ended up living in Los Angeles "at the last minute," once she committed to the idea of pursuing acting. Shortly afterwards, she obtained the starring role in Scary Movie. At age 22, she lived in a studio apartment at The Ravenswood in Hancock Park.

1986–1999: Early acting credits

Age and Birthday Details

Anna Faris was born on November 29, 1976.

As of 2026, Anna Faris is 49 years old.

Birthday milestones for public figures like Anna Faris routinely trend on social media, which is why "how old is" questions generate such consistent search demand.

Personal Life and Family

Encouraged by her parents to pursue acting when she was young, Faris gave her first professional performance at age nine in a three-month run of Arthur Miller's play Danger: Memory! at the Seattle Repertory Theater. She made US$250 for the role, which was "huge" for her at the time. "I felt like I was rolling in the dough," she recalled. She went on to play Scout in a production of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Village Theatre in Issaquah, Washington, the title character in Heidi, and Rebecca in Our Town. Her theater credits during that period included productions of Rain, Some Fish, No Elephants, and Life Under Water.

While in high school, Faris appeared in a television commercial for a frozen yogurt brand and in a training video for Red Robin. On the latter, she said in May 2012: "I play, like, the perfect hostess. And I think they still use it." While in college at the University of Washington in 1996, Faris appeared in the MSN Preview, an interactive CD-ROM promotional video for Microsoft's MSN 2.0 online service filmed at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle, as the presenter of Channel 5, a "hip and edgy" website for young adults.

Faris played brief roles in the made-for-TV film Deception: A Mother's Secret and the independent drama Eden, the latter of which screened at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. Her first major film role came shortly after college, in the independent slasher film Lovers Lane (1999), in which she played an ill-fated cheerleader. A B-movie, it received a straight-to-DVD release. Critical reception was mixed, but for her part, Faris garnered her first acting reviews by writers; efilmcritic.com's Greg Muskewitz found her the film's "one center of interest".

2000–2006: Breakthrough with Scary Movie

Recent Years

Faris's breakout role came in 2000 when she starred in the horror-comedy parody film Scary Movie, portraying Cindy Campbell, a play on the character of Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in the slasher thriller Scream. It marked her first starring credit, as she had appeared only in small and supporting parts in theater plays and low-budget features. She found the experience a "great boot camp" for her, as she told UK's The Guardian in 2009, explaining that she "hadn't done much before that. With those movies, you have to be so exact with your props and the physical comedy and everything, so it was a great training ground." Scary Movie was a major commercial success, ranking atop the box office charts with a US$42 million opening weekend gross. It went on to earn US$278 million worldwide. For her performance, Faris received nominations for the Breakthrough Female Performance and Best Kiss Awards at the 2001 MTV Movie Awards. She subsequently reprised her role in Scary Movie 2, released on July 4, 2001.

Her next film role was that of the lesbian colleague of a lonely and traumatized young woman in the independent psychological thriller May (2002), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was released in selected theaters. In its review, The Digital Fix found it "one of the finest examples of independent American genre filmmaking" and asserted that Faris played her role "with an infectious level of enthusiasm, frequently skirting the border between a believable performance and one that is completely over the top, but always managing to come down on the right side." Later in 2002, she starred alongside Rob Schneider and Rachel McAdams in the comedy The Hot Chick, about a teenage girl whose mind is magically swapped with that of a 30-year-old criminal. It was a modest commercial success, grossing US$54 million worldwide.

In 2003, Faris was "cast last-minute" opposite Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola's drama Lost in Translation, where she played a "bubbly, extroverted" actress. She felt the film gave her the chance to get people to know her body of work a "little more," and called it "the best experience of [her] life" at the time. While Variety remarked that Faris "contributes an amusing turn" as her "vacuous movie star" character, New York Times concluded that the actress, "who barely registers in the Scary Movie pictures—and she's the star—comes to full, lovable and irritating life as a live-wire starlet [...] this movie will secure her a career." Budgeted at US$4 million, Lost in Translation grossed US$119.7 million globally. She portrayed Cindy Campbell for the third time in 2003's Scary Movie 3.

In 2004, Faris debuted on the last season of the sitcom Friends in the recurring role of Erica, the mother whose twin babies are adopted by Chandler (Matthew Perry) and Monica (Courteney Cox); and in the summer that year, she filmed a small part in Ang Lee's drama Brokeback Mountain (2005). As her character had just "one scene in the movie," she only spent two days on set in Calgary. For the film, Faris, along with her co-stars, received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.

Frequently Asked Questions

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