Anna Kendrick: ‘I was being forced into a place of dishonesty in my private life’

The Oscar-nominated star of ‘Up in the Air’ and ‘Pitch Perfect’ has made her directorial debut with a terrifying story of a real-life serial killer. She speaks to Adam White about the traumatic relationship that led to her recent work, and why being seen as ‘quirky and relatable’ has its drawbacks

‘Sometimes the most torturous thing isn’t just the disrespect or mistreatment, but the fact that everyone’s acting like it’s not happening’ (Shutterstock)

Anna Kendrick knows what was missing. “In the parlance of the internet, I think I was known as sort of quirky and relatable,” she tells me. She says those last two words with deliberately exaggerated theatre-kid pep, a cheesy grin falling on the right side of annoying. If only just. “But in that, there’s not a lot of room for sadness and fear.”

It’s disorienting to see Anna Kendrick sad. It’s a bit like seeing a friend in tears, or an injured puppy with a plastic cone around its head. The actor’s default mode is a can-do squirrelly-ness, deployed sometimes with a song. Think of her Pitch Perfect movies, with their musical, Rebel Wilson-filled pluck. Or her performance as an eager-beaver HR employee in Up in the Air, which earned her an Oscar nomination. That spark-plug energy does tend to mask things on screen – a sliver of insecurity, usually, or some pained need for validation from an elder or peer – but sad or fearful she’s typically not.

Today, the 39-year-old sits in the stark white kitchen of her Los Angeles home. Her hair is sandy brown; she gnaws at her mouth. “Unfortunately, I do know that moment where you’re in a room with someone and wondering: ‘How is it that 10 seconds ago I thought everything was going fine, and now I’m not safe?’” Kendrick pulls the cuffs of her sweater over her fingertips, clutching them to her face. “And I think that’s something a lot of people know really well. Especially women.”

In 2022, Kendrick began to speak publicly about her relationship with a man whom she has described as “for all intents and purposes my husband”. They were together for just over six years, during which – she has alleged – she experienced “emotional abuse and psychological abuse”. Because of the themes of her directorial debut Woman of the Hour, which is streaming on Netflix, and those of her most recent movie, Alice, Darling – about a woman in an abusive relationship – it’s hard to talk about Kendrick’s work without talking about her personal life, too. She agrees, even if a part of her hates it. “For a second, I did think that interviews for this film would just involve me being asked about every member of the cast and the crew, and I’d just gush about them and...” She trails off, sing-songily. “But so far, no one’s asked me about the sound team.” She says this with a laugh, but I can’t help but wince a little. It’s that spark-plug energy. It’s good at masking things.

Woman of the Hour revolves around a series of killings committed by Rodney Alcala, a smooth-talking predator who charmed at least eight young women in the Seventies, took their photograph, then murdered them. The true extent of Alcala’s crimes is unknown – some suggest he may have been responsible for 130 murders. Kendrick’s film primarily focuses on a surreal episode in Alcala’s spree: his 1978 appearance on the US TV show The Dating Game, where he served as one of three bachelors attempting to woo a young woman named Cheryl (played in the movie by Kendrick).

The script came to her around the same time as the script for Alice, Darling, which was released last year. Cheryl, in Woman of the Hour, is suffering death by a thousand cuts – an aspiring actor so used to being the target of dismissive remarks and latent misogyny that she barely flinches when it happens. “It does feel like the most revealing piece of work I’ve ever done,” says Kendrick. “It created a window into my mind.” It’s left her feeling vulnerable. A little frightened. Certainly more anxious than usual.

I was about to say that I need to forgive myself for ever feeling doubt or sadness, but that implies that I’m doing something wrong

The parallels between Kendrick and her two movies also make conversation about them – and the women she plays in them – slightly tricky to unpack. Ideas blur. Subjects cross over one another. Anna is Alice is Cheryl is Anna again. “Sometimes the most torturous thing isn’t just the disrespect or mistreatment, but the fact that everyone’s acting like it’s not happening,” Kendrick says. “Which then convinces you that something’s not happening. It makes you question whether you’re making all of it up, or if you’re being paranoid or too sensitive.” She’s talking about gaslighting. “You sound crazy. You’re dismissed. ‘He brushed your hair off your shoulder – that’s nothing.’ And yet when you’re there, you can feel the threat that’s hanging in the room.” Kendrick speaks speedily and clearly. Every syllable is enunciated. If we were talking in a theatre and not over Zoom, you’d hear her from the back of the rafters.

Kendrick didn’t intend to speak publicly about her past relationship, but she fell into a habit of talking about it during interviews for Alice, Darling, saying in 2022 that it felt like “the Band-Aid got ripped off”. After the relationship came to an end, Kendrick told her agents that she needed to stop working, and wasn’t interested in reading the comedy scripts that had become her bread and butter.

When I broach this, Kendrick stutters. “I think I’d hit a point of critical mass, where it felt like...” She pauses, her eyes staring at the ceiling of her kitchen. “Oh boy, here we go,” she half-laughs. “I think what was happening at that time was I was being forced into a place of performance and dishonesty in my private life.” She shakes her head. “I just couldn’t spend another second breathing dishonest air.” She remembers a period of trauma-dumping on random strangers. “It’s a literal true story that, in the aftermath of this really traumatic relationship, my plumber came over and asked how I’d been, and I just told him everything. I physically couldn’t continue performing.”

This was particularly grave, because performing was all that Kendrick had really known. Born and raised in Portland, Maine, she was the archetypal preternaturally gifted child actor – a breed of person that inspires awe as much as it does slight repulsion. (As a former unbearable theatre kid myself, I believe I am entitled to say this.) She was just 12 when she received a Tony Award nomination for her role in a Broadway production of High Society. “Anna Kendrick, in a part that could be unbearable, is actually terrific,” wrote The New York Times, in a line that today reads as oddly prophetic of almost everything Kendrick did in the aftermath. “She is sharp, shrewd and unfailingly self-possessed.”

Death by a thousand cuts: Kendrick in her new film ‘Woman of the Hour’ (Leah Gallo/Netflix)

Was Kendrick weirdly confident as a child? “Oh yeah,” she grins. “The problem with identifying as a theatre kid, though, is that people will expect you to know really intense theatre minutiae and trivia. So I sort of opted out of it around the age of 12 – just to protect myself.”

She made her film debut at 17 in Camp, an eventual cult classic about incredibly gifted theatre kids starring in age-inappropriate plays at a summer camp. There followed parts in movies such as the nutty thriller A Simple Favor and Edgar Wright’s anarchic comic book film Scott Pilgrim vs the World, and an inexplicably minor role as Kristen Stewart’s human bestie in all five Twilight movies. (“Holy s***. I just remembered I was in Twilight,” she tweeted in 2018.) She became even more famous for being herself, the 5ft 2in embodiment of sharp, spiky, Obama-era sass, with a popular Twitter account and a bestselling book of essays, 2016’s Scrappy Little Nobody. Somewhere along the way, though – and all theatre kids will attest to this being commonplace – that early confidence dimmed a little.

“There’s definitely some formative adolescent period where you realise that there are people who know significantly more than you do,” she says. “So you become the passenger in the car, only to then get told as you get older that your job is to turn into the guy in the driver’s seat. And that feels an impassable gap a lot of the time.”

Relatable: Kendrick in 2012’s ‘Pitch Perfect’ (Shutterstock)

She developed a tendency to talk herself down as a result. She’d first been attached to Woman of the Hour as an actor only, and recalls giving the film’s producers “the most ambivalent pitch in the history of cinema” when its original director dropped out. “I said, ‘Guys, if you don’t think I can do it, I shouldn’t do it – if I’m not ready, don’t hire me.’” They told her to go away, refocus herself, and pitch again the following day. Coming back with renewed confidence, she was hired on the spot.

Kendrick, it turns out, more than knows her stuff as a director. Woman of the Hour is assured and visually arresting, full of smart approaches to depicting violence and a wonderful use of space. There is one particular shot towards the back end of the film, involving Cheryl walking across a vast parking lot, aware that Alcala is nearby, that is so chilling in its isolation that I’m convinced Kendrick could be a brilliant horror director.

I ask her if, between Alice, Darling and Woman of the Hour, she feels as though she’s reached a place of healing in her personal life. Has the work been cathartic? She chews her mouth again. “Ooh, I think catharsis is dangerous,” she says. “For me, anyway. It brings me very welcome relief, but so far it’s always been a bit temporary.” She begins to speak, before doubling back. “I was about to say that I need to forgive myself for ever feeling doubt or sadness, but that implies that I’m doing something wrong.”

She pulls her sweater up closer to her chin, so that she’s now swaddled in white fabric.

“When those feelings do creep back in, the worst thing I can do is go, ‘Goddammit, Anna! I thought we were over this,’ you know? I need to just experience it more as a neutral thing that’s happening. That it’s something out of my control.” She lets out a big sigh. “I certainly don’t enjoy it, but it’s not a character failing either.”

Instead, it’s just another facet to her. In other words, meet the new Anna Kendrick. Quirky. Relatable. And yeah, sometimes sad.

‘Woman of the Hour’ is streaming on Netflix