Anna Faris Finally Broke Her Silence About Her Split From Chris Pratt

At the time, Faris was talking to Rachel Bilson – the actress best-known for her long-running stint on The O.C. The podcast host had previously kept relatively quiet about being one half of a Hollywood power couple. Though on this occasion, she was more than happy to open up about her nine years with Parks and Recreation star Pratt.

Pratt and Faris walked down the aisle together in 2009 and three years later welcomed son Jack into the world. Sadly, in 2018 the couple officially went their separate ways. You might not know that Faris had previously been married to another actor. She first said “I do” to Raising Dad star Ben Indra in 2004, but four years on the pair headed for the divorce courts.

Faris had first appeared to address the split from Pratt on her own podcast in 2017. While advising a listener who’d called in for some guidance on their love life, the host remarked, “I made that mistake, I think, a little bit, like feeling like I’m checking my relationship off the list.” She then encouraged the fan to know her worth, independence and youth.

Then Faris went on to add, “Life is too short for you to be in relationships where you’re not feeling like this isn’t fully right. Or somebody doesn’t have your back, or somebody doesn’t fully value you.” Many listeners saw this as a thinly veiled comment about the host’s own impending divorce.

Faris was more explicit about her split from Pratt when she appeared on Sirius XM in April 2018. But she only had positive things to say. The actress told listeners, “We have a great friendship. We really do. And we always have. And yeah, it’s always tough to envision your future as one thing, but I think there’s a lot of love.”

Both parties have also found new loves since then. In 2020 Michael Barrett – who works as a cinematographer – asked for Faris’ hand in marriage. She said yes, too! The year previously Pratt had exchanged vows with Katherine Schwarzenegger – the daughter of action hero Arnie. In 2020 the happy couple became parents to a daughter named Lyla Maria.

It seems that Pratt and Faris are still on good terms, though. In fact, the latter publicly wished the former well when news of his engagement was first announced. After her ex-husband posted an Instagram snap of himself and Schwarzenegger showing off her ring, Faris replied in the comments section, “I’m so happy for you both! Congratulations.”

Faris also reiterated her happiness on Unqualified soon after. The star told listeners about receiving a text message from Pratt which read, “I proposed to Katherine [Schwarzenegger] last night,” to which she replied, “Ahh, that’s amazing.” The host added that she was excited about the extension of her immediate family before describing her ex’s new fiancée as “awesome.”

That being said, Faris herself doesn't seem too eager to jump back into marriage. The actress hinted she’s more than happy to take her time before tying the knot on the podcast Divorce Sucks. Faris told host Laura Wasser, “I will say I believe in love and monogamy... But I do struggle, having gone through it a couple of times now, Laura, with the idea of our legal system.”

Although Faris had occasionally discussed her marriage to Pratt, she’d never really explained why it ended. Yet while speaking to Gwyneth Paltrow on her own podcast in March 2021, the Scary Movie star revealed at least one contributing factor. It was the same issue that had plagued her relationship with first husband Indra, too.

Faris admitted, “My two other marriages were with actors and I don’t think we did a great job of eliminating competitiveness. Or at least I didn’t, being a proud person and not wanting to reveal vulnerability. Any hint of competitiveness and comparison, I didn’t handle that very well, I don’t think. And I hope I’ve grown from that.” Just two months later Faris brought up the subject of her own marriage again on another episode of Unqualified.

And Faris appeared to express regret that she’d ever got hitched in the first place. After hearing about a listener who’d decided to end things before making it down the aisle, Faris responded, “I really feel like calling off an engagement is a smarter, stronger, braver move than what I did. Which was like, well, I guess everyone is expecting this, so let’s just go through with it.”

Faris didn’t explicitly mention which marriage she was referring to, though. Could it have been the time she walked down the aisle with Pratt in 2009? Or was it the first time she said “I do” to Indra five years previously? Some listeners believed that it was Pratt that Faris had in mind – considering she’d only just been discussing her time with the Guardians of the Galaxy star.

Yes, Faris had first started talking to guest Bilson about her second marriage earlier on in the episode. And she revealed that the lack of close gal pals made its breakdown much harder to deal with. The host also went on to acknowledge that she also struggled to open up to anyone about it within her immediate circle.

Faris explained, “I think it stunted me in a lot of ways. One of them being that I never talked about any issues, so to the people – even who I was closest to – I’m sure things were more transparent with my relationship with [Indra]. But with [Pratt], I think that we both protected that imagery even within our close circles.”

The candidness continued when Faris added, “For me, I think after every breakup, at some point I realize that there were a lot of things I ignored that I really shouldn’t have. In hindsight, it felt like my hand was forced. I don’t think it was ever an independent decision.”

Faris now seems content to discuss her previous relationships in public, though she remains wary about opening up too much about the current one. On a 2019 episode of Unqualified, the Hollywood star said, “I’m in an amazing relationship, I do want to talk to everybody about these things, that I don’t really know much about. But I also feel that I want to protect things in a way that I hadn’t considered before.”

“I want to be honest and up front,” Faris continued. “But it also feels like, ‘Am I letting too much scrutiny [in]?’ I do think that I owe my listeners, because I attempt to give advice that’s usually not great or whatever, so I owe them my honesty if they’re being honest with me. But that’s been a trickier territory for me, and I’m still kind of figuring out all of that.”

Yet Faris certainly isn’t averse to encouraging others to reveal all. In 2021 the star launched a new card game which took inspiration from a feature on her Unqualified podcast. Dealbreakers asks players to open up about their experiences in the dating game. Faris told People, “It’s really conversational. And I like the idea of trying to break past passing easy judgment.”

No judgment is certainly a respectable ethos, and we salute you for it, Anna! But it's not always quite so easy to stop yourself from jumping to conclusions, and that's especially difficult when it comes to those more unusual celebrity break-ups. Luckily for Farris and Pratt, their split was pretty amicable, but that's not always the case. Take Ashton Kutcher, for example, who dealt with his split from fellow actor Demi Moore in a truly bizarre way.

Hearthrob, Kutcher, has had some well-publicized relationships through the years. His marriage to fellow That ’70s Show star Mila Kunis garnered its fair share of press attention, for one. Then, of course, there was his high-profile union with Demi Moore. But it was their divorce that really got tounges wagging. As it turns out, he ended up doing some slightly strange – and somewhat dangerous – stuff in the aftermath of the break-up, and he finally decided to talk about his frankly curious reaction to divorce in an eye-opening interview back in 2018.

Way before Kutcher met Moore he was a model. What’s more, his role as Michael Kelso on That ’70s Show was actually his first acting job. And Kutcher was originally convinced that he would end up getting fired from the series – if the program didn’t get canceled first, that is. In the end, though, the show became a big hit, and Kutcher became a star.

And Kutcher dated several beautiful young actresses after he hit the big time, including January Jones, Ashley Scott and Just Married co-star Brittany Murphy. His relationship with Murphy was the subject of rumors, however, especially after her death in 2009. In fact, controversial Lifetime movie The Brittany Murphy Story even suggested that the pair had actually been engaged at one point.

But Kutcher eventually fell into the arms of a woman 16 years his senior: Demi Moore. The two first met at a dinner hosted by friends and quickly hit it off. And by 2003 they were appearing on the red carpet together – most notably at the premiere for Moore’s movie Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Kutcher also began to study Kabbalah, a Jewish spiritual practice, with his girlfriend.

And the couple’s relationship was serious; in a September 2005 interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Moore would even go so far as to describe Kutcher as her “soulmate.” The pair got married that same month in a private ceremony in Beverly Hills, which was attended by many of their close friends and family.

Then, for a while, Kutcher and Moore’s marriage appeared to be running smoothly. They appeared close when out in public, at least; they also wrote complimentary things about each other on social media. Kutcher even got along great with his wife’s ex-husband, action star Bruce Willis.

But in 2010, the year before the couple split, rumors spread that Kutcher had been unfaithful to Moore with at least three other women. And while the couple denied all the claims – Kutcher even called out one magazine that had described him as a “cheater” – they nevertheless spent their sixth wedding anniversary apart.

And then, suddenly, it was all over, as in November 2011 the pair announced in separate statements that they were splitting up. “It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I have decided to end my six-year marriage to Ashton,” Moore stated to the Associated Press. “As a woman, a mother and a wife there are certain values and vows that I hold sacred, and it is in this spirit that I have chosen to move forward with my life.”

Kutcher, meanwhile, made his own statement on Twitter. There, he wrote, “I will forever cherish the time I spent with Demi. Marriage is one of the most difficult things in the world, and unfortunately sometimes they fail.” Kutcher subsequently filed for an official divorce in December 2012, citing “irreconcilable differences” as the reason. The paperwork was finalized the following year.

It wouldn’t be until 2018 that Kutcher revealed to the world how he had coped with the divorce, though. And the actor explained the slightly unusual things he did to deal with the situation while speaking to his buddy Dax Shepard on the podcast Armchair Expert.

It transpired that Kutcher had retreated to the mountains and essentially cut himself off from society for a bit. He revealed, “I took all my computers away, my phone, my everything. I was there by myself so there was no talking, and I just had a notepad and a pen and water and tea for a week.” That’s right – he’d cut himself off from normal eating and drinking habits, too.

Kutcher added on the podcast, “I did no food, no drink – just water and tea.” And apparently, this diet, combined with the solitude of the mountains, had an odd effect on him. The star went on, “I started to hallucinate on like day two, which was fantastic. It was pretty wonderful. I was doing tai chi with my own energy.”

That was despite the fact that Kutcher had never even done tai chi before. “I was just doing what came to me,” he added on Armchair Expert. “It was pretty wonderful.” The actor is a martial artist in another discipline, though; he’s been studying Brazilian jiu-jitsu for a good few years and earned a purple belt in 2014. And his teacher Rigan Machado told TMZ Sports in 2016 that Kutcher even “has a chance to be one of the top guys in jiu-jitsu.”

But Kutcher wasn’t only doing martial arts during his retreat; he also decided to try a different form of release. About this, he explained, “I wrote down every single relationship that I had where I felt like there was some grudge or some anything, and then I wrote letters to every single person and sent the letters on day seven.”

The star continued, “I typed [the letters] all out and sent them. It was almost like an AA exercise, where I was like, ‘I probably have done some damage.’ So I just cleared my palate.” All in all, Kutcher said, the seven days he spent in the mountains were “really spiritual and kind of awesome.”

And Kutcher has gone on to fast again. When preparing for the role of former Apple chief Steve Jobs in the 2013 biopic Jobs, for instance, he ate only fruit and nothing else. That extreme diet ended up putting him in the hospital a few days before production on the movie started.

When word got out about Kutcher’s unconventional dietary regime, though, Self magazine contacted Harvard Medical School’s Fatima Stanford to ask for her opinion. And it’s safe to say that she wasn’t a fan. “There is no benefit with doing something like this after a major life shift,” Dr. Stanford said. “When people fast, especially for lengthy periods of time, the brain has to pull from other sources to fuel itself.”

And that was the reason that Kutcher had begun to hallucinate and perform a martial art he wasn’t familiar with, Stanford explained. It wasn’t a healthy thing at all – it was his body beginning to dangerously feed off itself. So, although ultimately Kutcher had emerged from the experience seemingly unscathed, the consensus from Self and its contributing expert was clear: don’t try this at home.

However, Kutcher did say on the podcast that if he ever did something so extreme again, he would try and find a way to “get some nutrients” as well. Perhaps, though, he will never have a reason to fast once more. After all, Kutcher is a family man now, as he has two kids with Kunis.

The couple’s family grew by one with the arrival of daughter Wyatt in 2014; son Dimitri followed in 2016. What’s more, Kutcher’s been very vocal in the media about how much he loves his children and adores being a dad. And his relationship with Kunis, whom he knew for years before their romance started, appears to be a strong one. Hopefully, then, he’ll never feel the need to go on any more dangerous retreats…