Anna Faris has placed #44 on the 2011 list of Maxim’s “Hot 100″!
44. Anna Faris
Whoever said girls can’t be funny never met Anna Faris. And whoever said funny girls can’t be hot definitely never met Anna Faris.Heat factor: Anna will once again have you guffawing in What’s Your Number?
Anna Faris is in talks for the female lead in Sacha Baron Cohen’s new comedy The Dictator for Paramount Pictures. Last week we reported that Anna Faris, Kristen Wiig, and Gillian Jacobs were the front runners for the female lead, which has now been offered to Anna Faris.
The story centers around Sacha Baron Cohen’s character, a dictator who travels to America for a meeting at the United Nations. However, he discovers his second in command has replaced the dictator with a look-alike sheepherder. Anna Faris will play an organic food store owner who meets the dictator and gives him a fresh outlook on life, and perhaps a bit of romance as well. Here’s the official logline which was released by Paramount recently.
“The film tells the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed. It is inspired by the best selling novel, Zabibah and The King, by Saddam Hussein.”
Larry Charles is directing The Dictator from a script by Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer, David Mandel, and Dan Mazer. Production is scheduled to begin in May, with shooting to take place in New York City and Monaco.
The Dictator comes to theaters May 11th, 2012 and stars Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Jason Mantzoukas, Anna Faris. The film is directed by Larry Charles.
Casting for the next Sacha Baron Cohen film The Dictator is heating up, with producers looking to fill the part of the female lead. Kristen Wiig, Anna Faris and Gillian Jacobs (Community) are among the front-runners to play opposite Baron Cohen in the Borat-esque comedy. Larry Charles, who also helmed Borat and Bruno, is directing the film which tells the “heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed,” with Cohen playing a dictator who gets lost in the US.
THR reports that Jason Mantzoukas (The League) is already attached to play Cohen’s sidekick in the film. Producers are looking for actors with very strong improvisational skills, and understandably so given the unscripted nature of Borat and Bruno. The report stresses that Cohen and Co. are still looking to fill the female lead role, and it could very well end up going to someone other than Wiig, Faris or Jacobs. Filming is set to begin in May in New York and Morocco for a May 11th, 2012 release date.
The first trailer for “What’s Your Number?” has just been released – and you can watch it below!
“What’s Your Number?” will come to theaters on September 30th.
Last week, Anna Faris was photographed at the An Evening of Cocktails and Shopping To Benefit The Children’s Defense Fund in Los Angeles. I have just added 7 HQ and MQ photos of Anna from the event into our photo gallery!
Paramount has picked up an untitled comedy pitch from Anna Faris as a starring vehicle for the multi-hyphenate. Joe Roth and Palak Patel of Roth Films are on board to produce.
While details of the plot are being kept under wraps, the story revolves around Faris and a new roommate, who turns out to be a stalker from hell.
The idea for the project came from Faris’ reps — her agent at Gersh and manager at Anonymous Content — after they heard the comedienne recount a funny incident that happened to her in real life.
The idea was further developed by writer Deanna Kizis (who co-wrote Camp Rules for Montecito) and Patel. Kizis will now write the script
Faris will exec produce with Doug Wald.
One of the few female comedic actresses that can open movies, Faris (Scary Movie, The House Bunny) will next star in Fox’s What’s Your Number, which opens September 30.
Kiziz is repped by Gersh and Jaret Entertainment.
Paramount had no comment.
I saw “The House Bunny” with my family on the day it opened, in Miami Beach, where we were vacationing (yes, it was August), and it was obvious that it was a launching-pad for serious comic talent. In his Profile of Anna Faris in the magazine this week (available to subscribers), Tad Friend describes it as the actress’s “breakout film” (she plays a Playboy Playmate who is thrown out of the mansion and ends up teaching a sorority of social misfits the ways of seduction) but it also launched Emma Stone, who has ably filled the cinematic vacuum left by Lindsay Lohan’s indisposition and adds, to the role of sympathetic but socially challenged young woman, a charming tint of self-conscious intellectualism (which comes to the fore in “Easy A”).
One of the great virtues of the article is its rundown of the behind-the-scenes considerations involved in getting a Hollywood movie made, from the purely numbers-driven (e.g., Faris is less popular with international audiences than is Reese Witherspoon, which is why studios are inclined to meet her higher pay rate) to the politico-social: what Tad calls “the almighty Laws of Date Night,” which include such terms as “Men rule,” “Women don’t have to be funny,” and “Also, women aren’t funny.” Tad speaks with Nicholas Stoller, who directed “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Get Him to the Greek,” who says, “There’s a misogyny in audiences, a much higher bar of required likability for women stars.”
Here’s where the margins grow mighty: what Hollywood studios can, or dare, to do is necessarily dependent on producers’ sense of widely held attitudes; what independent filmmakers can do depends mainly on a filmmaker’s sense of what makes for a good movie. And when a movie connects with a crucial niche audience, the fast filtration (thanks to the world of the Internet) from the margin to the mainstream may well effect changes in popular attitudes—not because of any political persuasion or underlying social change, but purely because of the artistic equivalent of fashion and style—that would otherwise have arrived only very slowly and very gradually. I hope that Tad’s piece inspires women filmmakers to do all that the studios say they can’t—and the fact that Lena Dunham’s inspired “Tiny Furniture” has been brought under the aegis of Judd Apatow’s production company (as Rebecca Mead reported here last year) is a sign that it may actually be happening.
