Anna Faris is reeling over former boss Chuck Lorre’s recent dig at her Mom casting, saying the out-of-nowhere diss “hurts”.
“Yikes. Yes, I read a few things. I really didn’t see that coming,” the actress wrote in a statement shared to Instagram Thursday. “Of course it hurts.”
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“Chuck gave me a job I loved, and for seven years I never took a day of it for granted,” she continued. “I’m proud of what we made together, and nothing changes how grateful I am for those people and those years.”
Faris, who said she has been sober for a year and a half, then noted how ironic it was that she was “on a show about recovery and then [she] lived it”.
“Now I’m healthy, I’m working, and I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time,” she concluded her statement. “If anyone reading this is where I was, I hope that’s useful. It gets better. I’m proof.”
Lorre, who co-created Mom, wrote in his new memoir, Sitcom, that he was initially hesitant to cast Faris in the lead role of the CBS series – despite her being the network’s first choice.
“I wasn’t sure Anna would be appropriate for this kind of material,” Lorre, 73, said in his book. “Then I thought about how badly I’d bungled my working relationship with [Two and a Half Men star] Charlie Sheen.”
Further reflecting on his experience with Sheen, the prolific TV creator wrote that he reconsidered his doubts about Faris, writing, “Someone’s personal life is none of my business. The mom in Mom would be, and should be, Anna Faris.”
Lorre later added that his initial reservations about hiring Faris to play Christy Plunkett opposite Allison Janney as Bonnie Plunkett had been “correct” when she left for “mysterious reasons that were not mysterious to anyone on the show”.
Faris starred on the sitcom for seven seasons, exiting before the eighth — and what eventually would be its final — season. The show aired from 2013 to 2021.
Lorre went on to praise the later seasons of the show in Sitcom, writing that “Mom found its true voice” by showing that “there is hope, and there is laughter in overcoming the seemingly fatal disease of alcoholism”.
He also criticised CBS for cancelling the series, noting that the network “decided they could live without a perfect cast led by a national treasure”, referring to Janney.
Faris opened up about her decision to leave Mom in a June appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, saying she “started to lose [her] focus” and calling the show a “marathon”.
The Scary Movie actress said her exit from the “intense, amazing project” came at a “complicated time”.
This article originally appeared in Page Six and was reproduced with permission
Originally published as Anna Faris reacts to former boss Chuck Lorre’s Mom casting diss in memoir: ‘It hurts’