DIFFERENT STANDARDS

‘Hurt’ Sitcom Star Responds to TV Legend’s Brutal Diss

The TV mogul insisted her personal life was none of his business. Then he put it in a book.

Sitcom king Chuck Lorre once decided Anna Faris’ private life was off-limits. Six years after she quit one of his biggest shows, he put her in his memoir anyway, and she has now gone public with her sobriety in response.

“Yikes. Yes, I read a few things. I really didn’t see that coming. Of course it hurts,” Faris, 49, wrote on Instagram on Thursday.

The post was in response to a passage in Sitcom, the book in which Lorre, 73, claimed Faris’ 2020 departure from CBS’ Mom vindicated his early doubts about hiring her.

“After six years, she left the show for mysterious reasons that were not mysterious to anyone on the show,” he wrote.

Lorre never spelled out what those reasons were, but he didn’t have to. In the same passage, he tied his hesitation over Faris to Charlie Sheen, the Two and a Half Men star whose addiction struggles he says turned the set into a “nightmare.”

“I wasn’t sure Anna would be appropriate for this kind of material. Then I thought about how badly I’d bungled my working relationship with Charlie Sheen,” Lorre wrote in an excerpt published by Page Six.

He went on to cast her as Christy Plunkett, a single mom clawing her way to sobriety, after telling himself: “Someone’s personal life is none of my business.”

That principle appears to have expired once Lorre had a book to sell.

Lorre’s memoir appears to hold the two stars to different standards. Sheen, whose erratic behavior Lorre says made the Two and a Half Men set a “nightmare,” was fired in 2011 and sued Lorre for $100 million. Lorre writes that he “bungled” that working relationship. Faris left Mom with a statement thanking Lorre by name and no public dispute. In the same book, Lorre presents her exit as proof that his doubts about her were “correct.”

Lorre, whose credits include The Big Bang Theory, got to tell his side in print with no one to push back. Faris was left to answer in an Instagram caption. She did it by revealing something she had kept private.

“I’ve been sober for a year and a half. I was on a show about recovery, and then I lived it,” she wrote.

She offered no counterattack. She called Mom “a job I loved” and said she “never took a day of it for granted” in seven years. She saved her final words for fans. “It gets better. I’m proof,” she wrote. The post pulled in more than 66,000 likes within hours.

The contrast with her exit is stark. When Faris left Mom ahead of its eighth season, she told E! News she was going “to pursue new opportunities” and thanked Lorre by name. He stayed quiet for six years, then delivered his verdict in hardcover.

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Briana CharlesReporter

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