To hear Anna Faris speak is to realize that playing dumb is more complicated than it looks. The actress, cool and slender as the bottle of water she's drinking, is in a Hollywood bar, talking about why she's scornful of monologues and how all acting is about human interaction. "The script isn't as important as what actors do together," she says. "It's the dynamic between people."

There's a pause. Faris feels obliged to explain the origins of her theory. "Everyone in my family is a sociologist," she says. "My brother, my dad, one of my grandfathers - everybody." She knows that as she's saying this you're probably thinking about her goofier onscreen exploits, like the scene in Scary Movie 4 in which a green hand merges from behind her to shave her armpits.

Faris' career has been built on such golden cinematic moments (a fifth Scary Movie is on the way) in masterpieces like Smiley Face, in which she plays a stoner who fries cannabis in butter for breakfast, and Just Friends, in which she's a pop diva who sets her private jet on fire by leaving the tinfoil on her microwave dinner. In The House Bunny, out this month, Faris, 31, portrays a Playboy Bunny who gets booted from the mansion and ends up in a sorority house - as they like to say in Hollywood, The Battleship Potemkin it's not.