Scary Movie 1: How Anna Faris Landed The Impossible-To-Cast Role Of Cindy

The Wayans family was no stranger to parodies when they started working on "Scary Movie." Not only did they have their own sketch comedy show with "In Living Color," but they had also made a previous spoof movie of hood crime dramas. Thus the pivot to another subgenre that was popular at the time, slasher movies, made a lot of sense.

While teen slashers like "Scream" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" were the primary punching bags for "Scary Movie," plenty of other targets from the late-'90s like "The Matrix" and Budweiser's "Whazzup" ad campaign were also heavily featured amid the gross-out humor bits and satirical takes on murder.

Still, it seems like one of the biggest challenges for "Scary Movie" was finding its lead girl, Sidney Prescott parody, Cindy Campbell. Though Anna Faris was eventually cast in the central role, as director Keenen Ivory Wayans explained to Entertainment Weekly, it was only after an extensive search for talent.

"The biggest surprise was Anna. And it wasn't really a surprise; it was a gift," Wayans explained. "I had seen everybody, and I kept saying no to the point that the casting people were getting p***ed. But I was looking for someone specific," the director went on.

However, from this internal production strife came a flash of good luck when someone from casting had a hunch about someone with very little acting experience. "I remember the casting person saying, 'I read a girl that I think is right, but she's never done anything before,'" Keenen Ivory Wayans recalled. "And I was like, 'Yeah, okay.'"

That decision would ultimately change everything as Anna Faris immediately had the kind of energy that they were looking for, despite her lack of training. "I don't think I even had a headshot. I didn't have an agent," Faris said. "I remember feeling this odd combination of total elation, dizziness, and loneliness. Like, 'Has my life just completely shifted?'" she wondered.

It definitely had. From here on, Faris was cast in dozens of movies and television shows and even landed her own sitcom, which ran for eight seasons from 2013-2021. It sounds like Wayans could already see this kind of potential in the performer too. "The fact that she hadn't done anything before was perfect because she was going off of her instincts, and she had this natural innocence and was funny," Wayans said. The rest, as they say, is history.