Anna Faris

The Scary Movie franchise wasn't supposed to make a star, but Anna Faris played dumb so convincingly that audiences couldn't stop watching. She had done almost nothing before landing the role of Cindy Campbell in 2000, a spoof of Neve Campbell's Sidney Prescott in Scream. The film opened to $42 million and cleared $278 million worldwide, not what anyone expected from a horror parody. She returned for three more sequels, and what all of them revealed was someone with serious physical comedy precision inside material that didn't deserve her.

The Scary Movie sequels ran dry before her thirties ended, but Mom, the CBS sitcom she joined in 2013, kept her working for seven seasons before she left ahead of the finale. Her advice podcast Unqualified, launched in 2015 and later signed to Acast, built a following with no connection to her film work. The companion memoir reportedly landed on bestseller lists. Her 2017 divorce from Chris Pratt, who had become a Marvel headliner during their marriage, generated more press than anything she'd been in for years, which was either bad timing or the best brand awareness she'd had since Scary Movie.

She met Chris Pratt at a 2007 table read where their characters were written as love interests, a detail that writes itself. Their son Jack was born seven weeks premature in 2012 and spent a month in intensive care. She got into podcasting in 2015, well before it was the default celebrity side hustle, and Unqualified evolved from a promo vehicle into a genuine advice show. She's said the Scary Movie sets were harder than they looked: 'You have to be so exact with your props and the physical comedy and everything.'