Highlights
- Anna Faris says she was “pretty depressed” leaving Mom in 2020, calling it undiagnosed perimenopausal depression.
- She linked her drinking to depression and credits sobriety and hormone patches for a major mental shift.
- Faris admits she nearly quit acting entirely, questioning if she had enough money to retire.
Anna Faris has spent two decades playing the ditzy blonde with a heart of gold, but her latest press tour reveals the real plot twist: she was quietly falling apart behind the laugh track.
On a recent episode of the Dear Chelsea podcast, the Mom alum peeled back the veneer on her exit from the CBS sitcom, and the picture she paints is less “graceful bow-out” and more slow-motion identity crisis.
Faris recalled feeling like her career was “being put out to pasture” as she neared her departure from Mom in 2020, after seven seasons. Looking back now, she doesn’t mince words about what was actually happening under the surface. “I was, in hindsight, I think pretty depressed,” Faris said, chalking it up to perimenopausal depression she didn’t recognize at the time.
That’s a hell of an admission from a woman who built a career on physical comedy and exaggerated cluelessness. Depression doesn’t care about your box office numbers.
Then there’s the drinking. Faris, who spent seven years playing a recovering alcoholic on “Mom” of all shows, finally connected her own dots on air.
She told Chelsea Handler there was a correlation between drinking and depression for her specifically, and that she needed to step back from alcohol so as not to sabotage herself. The self-awareness is almost too on the nose — playing sober for a paycheck while quietly not living it.
She’s calling sobriety a gift now, and not in the vague Instagram-caption sense. Faris described her shift in perspective as “one of the many gifts” of quitting alcohol, and credited an unglamorous but honest assist: hormone patches, which she said, “made a huge difference.” No wellness-brand sponsorship required, just middle-aged biology finally getting acknowledged out loud.
The identity spiral didn’t stop at addiction, though. Faris also copped to genuinely weighing retirement once the Mom gig ended, wondering if her Hollywood clock had simply run out. She questioned whether she had “enough [money] to retire,” and admitted the post-show freefall felt like “the first time that I didn’t have my foot on the gas.”
For a woman who’d been booked solid since Scary Movie launched her in 2000, unscheduled time apparently felt less like rest and more like existential vertigo.
She kept working anyway, eventually landing back on set with The Estate and a Scary Movie reboot she’s called a fitting bookend to her career.
