Chuck Lorre Hired Anna Faris Anyway. His Memoir Takes It Back.

The most interesting thing about this story is not the insult. It is that Chuck Lorre's own book already answered it.

Lorre's memoir, called Sitcom, came out on Tuesday 13 October. In it he writes about casting Anna Faris as Christy Plunkett, the lead role in his CBS comedy Mom, and he is candid that he did not want to.

"I initially said no. I wasn't sure Anna would be appropriate for this kind of material," he wrote, in a passage quoted by TheWrap.

Then he explains what changed his mind, and this is the part worth reading twice. "Then I thought about how badly I'd bungled my working relationship with Charlie Sheen," he wrote. And he concluded: "Someone's personal life is none of my business. The mom in 'Mom' would be, and should be, Anna Faris."

That is a man describing a lesson he learned. He had doubts, he remembered how badly he had handled a previous situation, he decided it was not his business, and he gave her the job.

And then the memoir undoes it

In the same book, Lorre revisits the decision and comes down on the other side.

According to Deadline, Lorre writes that his "initial reluctance" was "in fact, correct". He also writes that Faris left the series "for mysterious reasons that were not mysterious to anyone on the show".

That second line is the one doing the damage. It does not say anything. It just gestures at something and lets the reader fill it in, which in a published memoir is a choice.

There is also a small irony in the format. Faris has written a memoir of her own. Hers came out in 2017, was called Unqualified, and was a New York Times bestseller. She knows exactly how much room a writer has to decide what to put in a book and what to leave out.

Faris answered on Thursday

She posted a response on Instagram on Thursday 15 October.

"Yikes," she began. "Yes, I read a few things. I really didn't see that coming. Of course it hurts."

Then, rather than returning fire, she went the other way.

"Chuck gave me a job I loved, and for seven years I never took a day of it for granted," she wrote. "I'm proud of what we made together, and nothing changes how grateful I am for those people and those years."

TMZ reported that people close to her were considerably less polite about the comments.

What she said about her own life

In the same post, Faris also chose to share something about herself, and it is worth stating plainly and then leaving alone.

She wrote that she has been sober for a year and a half, that she had worked on a show about recovery and then went through it herself, and that she is now healthy, working, and happier than she has been in a long time. The A.V. Club reported that she also added a short message to anyone else in recovery: it gets better.

She said that herself, publicly, in her own words, and she said it on her own terms. Nothing further belongs in this story, and nothing further is anybody's business.

What Mom actually was

The reason the memoir line lands at all is the size of the thing she is being second guessed about.

Mom ran for eight seasons on CBS, from 23 September 2013 to 13 May 2021. Lorre created it with Eddie Gorodetsky and Gemma Baker. Faris and Allison Janney played the leads, a daughter and mother both in recovery, with a supporting cast that included Mimi Kennedy, Jaime Pressly, Beth Hall, William Fichtner and Kristen Johnston.

Faris played Christy Plunkett for seven of those eight seasons, which came to 152 episodes. By 2018 the show was the third most watched comedy on broadcast television. The show ran one more year without her and then ended. She did not appear in the finale.

A seven season, 152 episode run as the title character of a network comedy is not a casting error. Whatever happened at the end, the first seven years happened too.

The part nobody is saying

Put the two halves of the memoir side by side.

In one, Lorre writes that somebody's personal life is none of his business, and casts her. In the other, he writes that his doubts were correct, and hints at reasons he will not name.

Both of those are in the same book, written by the same person, about the same decision. The first version is the one that produced seven seasons of television and a role Faris says she loved. The second version is the one that produced a news cycle.

She was already back at work

The line in her post about working is not a hopeful statement about the future. It is a description of this year.

Faris returned as Cindy Campbell in a new Scary Movie, which came out on 5 June 2026. That character is the one that made her famous in 2000, and the franchise is the reason most people knew her name long before Mom. Her recent credits also include Spa Weekend, which came out in August 2026.

Before Mom she had already built a career most comic actors would take: Scary Movie and three sequels, The Hot Chick, Lost in Translation, Just Friends, The House Bunny, which she produced herself, the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs films, What's Your Number, The Dictator. She had a recurring part in the final season of Friends in 2004. From 2015 to 2023 she made 249 episodes of her own advice podcast, Unqualified.

None of which is a defence, because she does not need one. It is just the context for a memoir line suggesting she was the wrong hire.

Where it stands

Lorre has not publicly responded to Faris's post. Faris has not said anything further since it went up. The book is out and both statements are on the record, which is where this is likely to sit.

The show, for what it is worth, is still streaming, and still has the same two names at the top of the cast list.