FUNNY BUNNY

INTERVIEW:Anna Faris has made a name for herself as Hollywood's queen of raucous comedy. This smart actress may play a Playboy bunny in her latest film, The House Bunny, but she is serious about carving out a comic niche.

ANNA FARIS may be a proper movie star, but, from time to time, she still finds herself being embarrassed by her proud dad. "Oh, that can be mortifying," she laughs. "We'll be in the grocery store and I'll hear him say to the checkout clerk: 'You know my daughter?' And the clerk will look confused. 'She was in Scary Movie,' he'll say. And she won't know what he's talking about." I know kids whose parents have proudly shown the postman their gymkhana rosettes. It's a natural thing. "Yeah, I know. But I am 31. It's mortifying."

Despite the indifference of certain checkout clerks, Anna Faris has, through application and formidable comic timing, won a unique place in the hearts of thinking movie fans. First achieving prominence in Scary Movie (2000), the initial emission in a series of broad horror parodies, Faris might well have been overpowered by all those faux bodily fluids and lewd puns. But critics and the public failed to miss her considerable gifts.

Few actors have received such glowing reviews in such poor films, and she has rapidly gained a sizable cult following. Just look at this recent encomium from the august, sober New York Times: "All hail Anna Faris, fake bimbo par excellence, master of the bird-brained double take, our reigning queen of intelligent stupidity."

With the release of her latest raucous comedy, The House Bunny, one senses another swell of good feeling rushing towards her. The film turns out to be, well, uneven, but Faris is every bit as terrific as we have come to expect. Nobody is better at rendering innocent bemusement than the girl from Seattle.

Yet the comedy career happened largely by accident. "I was a very serious little girl growing up," she says. "All through the first Scary Movie, I thought I was about to get fired. My college room-mate was aghast that I was cast in a comedy. 'You are just not funny,' she said. 'What are you going to do?' I am just not a natural joke teller."

She may not often get mistaken for Bette Midler, but Anna Faris is, in fact, very amusing company. Blonde with delicate features, she exhibits an admirable tendency towards self-mockery and appears to have little taste for the fussiness of film promotion. As our interview starts, three PR people sit in various corners of the room holding her in a complex surveillance pattern. (Has she been involved in some awful scandal that has passed me by?) "Are you guys going to be here as well," she eventually says in a playful voice.

"Would you like us to leave?"

"Well, maybe. I don't want to put you on the spot or anything."

The minders shuffle off to the bar and leave us to ponder her surprising emergence as this century's Judy Holliday. "I graduated from college and dreamed about going off to London to write," she says. "I never made it. I had acted a bit, but had decided to stop because I didn't want such an unstable career. I was just doing the odd commercial and training video when I got cast in this unbelievably atrocious horror film Lovers' Lane. Have you seen it?" Can't say I have.

"Oh, you are missing a real piece of art there. But it did inspire me to try acting again. I thought I would move to LA and try it for a year. If it didn't work out, then fine." Scary Movie changed things. The film, devised by the notoriously lowbrow Wayans brothers, was a smash, and inspired a series of equally undemanding sequels.

Faris claims that it took her some time to realise that, following the success of Scary Movie, she had been typecast in comic parts. It wasn't until Sofia Coppola approached her and asked her to play a significant supporting role in Lost in Translation that she got a sense of how she was perceived. Faris gave a splendid performance as a self-absorbed, hysterically dumb movie star who is attending a junket at the same Tokyo hotel where Bill Murray is having his nervous breakdown.

"I was auditioned six months before being cast. As I finally performed the character in the movie, it just felt like pulling on Cinderella's shoe. When I was auditioning, I'd thought that I must have this role. But I didn't really realise that there was anything unusual about my being cast in that sort of film. Until then, I had been protected by agents and so forth. I didn't realise how I was perceived."

In 2005, Ang Lee offered her another significant cameo in Brokeback Mountain. She plays the infuriatingly chatty wife of the cowboy businessman who exchanges glances with Jake Gyllenhaal. Yet we are still waiting for Faris to grab hold of a significant dramatic role.

It seemed that she might have been on the cusp of a breakthrough when she signed up to play Linda Lovelace, the doomed star of the porn movie Deep Throat, in a film to be entitled Inferno. However, last month it was announced that she was leaving the project. "It was a beautiful script," she says. "I was attached to that movie for three years. I don't doubt that it will be a beautiful story in the end.

"I haven't really talked about this before, but I think I got a little worried about doing a movie like The House Bunny, playing a Playboy bunny, and then my next project being a porn star. I started to think that might be an odd juxtaposition."

This is an interesting comment. There are several dubious aspects to The House Bunny and it seems that Anna is not unaware of them. The film finds Faris playing an inhabitant of the Playboy mansion, who, upon reaching superannuation at 27, is forced to leave and take up work as a "housemother" in a college sorority house. The students are scruffy, dateless indie kids who Faris buffs into overdressed party girls. Yet the film's final message is to "be yourself". Huh? Surely they were being themselves until she came along.

"Right, right. It's always difficult to be some sort of spokesperson," she says warily before going on to ponder her family's attitude to her career. Both her dad and her brother are respected sociologists. "Yeah. And my mom is always saying: 'You are a role model. You have to behave yourself.' Am I? My original vision was a story about this Playboy bunny who gets kicked out of the mansion because she is addicted to drugs and has to return to her Christian town. It wasn't a comedy and I soon realised it wasn't very saleable."

Now this sounds like an interesting picture that might have taken some potshots at the squalid Playboy ethos. The House Bunny features a wooden cameo from Hugh Heffner, the magazine's founder, and includes several scenes shot in the mansion. She must, surely, have found the experience a teeny bit creepy. Here is this old, rich man surrounded by women young enough to be his great grand-daughters (really).

"Well, in a funny way, I wish it were a little creepier," she says. "It has such a crazy reputation. I felt like I wanted to sneak off from security and explore the hidden rooms, but they didn't let me. I thought Mr Heffner was slightly unsure of who I was. I can understand that. I was one of 30 blondes wandering around. But I was really flattered to shoot there. It was a huge compliment."

Whatever about the film's questionable approach to contemporary sexual politics, The House Bunny does offer Faris another opportunity to be hilariously dim. Following her withdrawal from Inferno, has she decided to focus on comedy? "For the last couple of years, I have had the odd opportunity to do less comic roles," she explains. "But I think I want to reject that for the moment. I love the idea of being a comedic actress and of making people happy. That makes me happy. If there are dramatic roles in the future, then great, but I am very content with being known for doing comedy."

She goes on to fantasise about buying a house in the woods and settling down with a nice man and a few children. (She and her first husband, Ben Indra, were divorced earlier this year.) But she enjoys the work too much to countenance a retreat from acting.

"I would like a quiet life, but I do hope this goes on a little while longer and I still get to perform. I really love to perform. Not every actor does, I think."

The House Bunnyis on general release.