Anna Faris Quit Drinking After Noticing a Link to Her Depression

Anna Faris quit drinking, and this week she actually said why out loud. The 49-year-old, still best known for playing Cindy Campbell in the Scary Movie movies, sat down with Chelsea Handler for an episode of Dear Chelsea released August 20. Somewhere between talking about her teenage son’s newfound religious streak and describing a hug she gave a co-star on set, she got to the part that’s now making headlines: cutting out alcohol, she says, may have pulled her out of a depression she didn’t even realize she had.

What She Actually Said

Faris didn’t dress it up. “Turns out there’s a correlation between drinking and depression for me for sure,” she told Handler, adding that she “had to take a step back to not self-sabotage.” She wasn’t specific about when she stopped — just that it’s been building over roughly the last year, gradually, rather than as one dramatic before-and-after moment.

Handler didn’t seem surprised. She’s talked before about how drinking just hits differently once you’re past 40 — less desire for it, less payoff when you do — and she pushed the point that staying honest with yourself about how your body actually feels matters more as you get older. It’s the kind of thing you’ll see echoed constantly in online sobriety communities: people well into their 50s describing better sleep, steadier moods, and clearer thinking once they cut back.

It Wasn’t Just the Alcohol

Here’s the part a lot of the quick-hit headlines skipped: Faris also credits hormone therapy. She told Handler that starting a hormone patch “made a huge difference,” and looking back now, she thinks she went through a stretch of perimenopausal depression — feeling disconnected from her career, her city, even worrying about whether she’d saved enough to eventually retire, without connecting any of it to hormones at the time. Handler related hard to this part. She described her own period of almost zero estrogen as the closest she’s ever come to what people describe as clinical depression, and said that within a day of adjusting her dosage, she started to feel something like hope again.

Rethinking the Career, Too

Since Anna Faris quit drinking, she says she’s also started seeing her own career differently. For years, by her own admission, she felt weirdly “ungracious” about being known mostly for spoof comedy — she’d catch herself comparing her path to actors who’d broken through in more “serious” ways, which she now recognizes as a pretty unfair way to think about it.

That shift came into focus while shooting the Scary Movie 6 reboot in 2025. Faris recalled grabbing co-star Marlon Wayans by the arms on set to thank him in person, something she said she’d always wished she could’ve done for his brother, Keenan Ivory Wayans, who directed the original 2000 film that basically launched her career. She also mentioned that it’s only in the past year that she’s noticed fans smiling when they recognize her — rather than assuming, as she used to, that they’d feel embarrassed to be associated with her comedic roles.

The Part Fans Already Half-Knew

There’s a detail worth sitting with here: Anna Faris quit drinking after years of playing a recovering alcoholic on CBS’s Mom, a role she held for seven seasons opposite Allison Janney before leaving a season early. She hasn’t drawn a straight line between the character and her real life, but plenty of people reacting to the podcast clip online have noticed the overlap anyway.

The conversation wandered further into identity and motherhood, too. Faris shares 13-year-old son Jack with ex-husband Chris Pratt, and talked about how becoming a parent complicated her sense of who she was — comedic actress or mom, and whether she had to pick one. She said she hopes future generations don’t inherit that same pressure to be perfect.

Why People Are Actually Talking About This

Part of why this is spreading beyond the usual celebrity news cycle is that Anna Faris quit drinking and tied it directly to a real mental health shift, not just a wellness buzzword. And the science backs up what she’s describing — tolerance, recovery time, and mood effects around alcohol all change significantly after 40, and researchers increasingly treat the drinking-depression connection as a genuine, measurable pattern rather than coincidence. Paired with her honesty about hormone therapy, it’s a rare moment where a public figure lays out how two overlapping issues were quietly working against her at once — and what it took to notice.