Mena Adrienne Suvari was born on February 9, 1978 in Newport, Rhode Island, to Episcopalian parents Candice, a nurse of Greek descent, and Ando, a retired Estonian psychiatrist. Mena was named after her British aunt, who was herself named after the House of Mena Hotel, which is situated near the pyramids in the Valley of the Kings, in Egypt. .

Mena and her three older brothers, Sulev, AJ, and Yuri, spent their early years in an old stone mansion that she insists was haunted. The family later relocated to Charleston, South Carolina, where her three older brothers lined up to attend the Citadel (a military college). Mena, meanwhile, was entertaining dreams of becoming an archaeologist, astronaut, or doctor. Her interests took a turn for the... less cerebral, however, when a modeling agency stopped by her all-girls school to offer classes. At age 12, after receiving a few pointers on her runway strut, Suvari attended a modeling convention and was snapped up by the New York-based Wilhelmina agency. She commuted up and down the East Coast for two years before her parents decided to move their budding starlet to California.

When Mena was thirteen, she got her first taste of acting in a Rice-a-Roni commercial. At the age of nineteen, she was in her first film, Nowhere, about a group of high schoolers living in Los Angeles.

In 1997, Mena appeared in the movie, Kiss the Girls, starring Ashley Judd, and in 1998, she was in Slums of Beverley Hills a critically acclaimed film, which also starred Natasha Lyonne, who would appear with Mena later in American Pie. In 1999, Mena appeared in Carrie 2: The Rage, American Pie, and American Beauty, which won five Oscars, gaining her a huge fan base. She appeared in the teen flick, Loser, in 2000, alongside her American Pie co-star, Jason Biggs.

It was also in 2000, on March 18, that Mena married her long-time boyfriend, Robert Brinkman, a 38-year-old cinematographer. The sixteen year difference in their ages is dismissed by Mena as insignificant, understandable in light of the twenty year difference in her parents' ages. (Now divorced. )