Anna Faris Lost in Translation (2003)
Anna Faris was twenty-five when she shot Lost in Translation in the fall of 2002, two years past the surprise success of Scary Movie (2000) and the parody-franchise career it had launched. Sofia Coppola cast her as Kelly, the vapid American starlet in Tokyo for the press junket of an action film called Midnight Velocity, who recognizes Bob in the Park Hyatt lobby, gushes at him, and tells Charlotte "not everybody went to Yale."b10
Born in Baltimore, made by Scary Movie
Faris was born in 1976 in Baltimore and raised in Edmonds, Washington, the daughter of a sociology professor and a teacher. She attended the University of Washington and graduated with a degree in English. Scary Movie (2000), in which she starred for the Wayans brothers as the Sidney Prescott analog Cindy Campbell, was a $19 million surprise that grossed $278 million worldwide and committed her to a sequel cycle through the mid-2000s.
How Kelly works
Kelly is on screen for perhaps four minutes total. The character does three things: gushes at Bob in the Park Hyatt lobbyb10, patronizes Charlotte with the "not everybody went to Yale" line, and reappears later at a press conference for Midnight Velocity talking about her "orange-flavored Pocky" and her belief that her "anorexia is going to be such a turn-on." The character is doing satirical work: she is the public version of femininity the film is not endorsing, against which Charlotte's interior reads as the privileged alternative.
"Anna Faris is hilariously precise as the bubbly, breathless starlet — the kind of performer who has confused publicity with personality. The two minutes she spends in the lobby tell you everything you need to know about the world Charlotte is supposed to be aspiring to." — Stephanie Zacharek, Salon (2003)
The Cameron Diaz question
The character has been read since the film's release as a thinly veiled portrait of Cameron Diaz, who in 2002 was promoting Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and had been the public face of a particular kind of bubbly-blonde celebrity press persona. Faris herself has, in multiple interviews, declined to confirm the comparison while also declining to particularly deny it.
"I had heard that. I never asked Sofia about it. I think Sofia just wrote a part she had observed in the world, and I played it. Whatever resemblance there is to anyone in particular is up to the viewer." — Anna Faris, Vulture (2018)
Diaz has never publicly commented. The question is sustained mostly by viewers and critics; the the question gets its own page in this wiki because the answer matters less than the way the rumor has shaped the character's reception.
After Lost in Translation
Faris went back into the Scary Movie franchise (3 in 2003, 4 in 2006), did Just Friends (2005), The House Bunny (2008) which she also produced, Observe and Report (2009), and the Bret McKenzie / Jason Segel The Muppets (2011). The CBS sitcom Mom (2013–2021) became the long-form middle of her career; she has hosted the Unqualified podcast since 2015, and appeared in a small but pointed cameo in Barbie (2023).
She has been candid in interviews and on the podcast about the difficulty of being typecast as the funny blonde — the Translation part is one of the few times in her career where the typecasting is being looked at, not used.
"Sofia gave me a small thing to do, but it was the first time anyone had hired me for the very thing I was usually hired for and asked me to make it sad. That's a different note. I don't get asked for it often." — Anna Faris, Unqualified podcast (2017, episode 50)