nna Kendrick is so well-known for her short, quippy social media posts that in honor of her birthday one year, People magazine compiled a list of some of her best zingers. (A sampling: “So there’s NO existing service that rents puppies to people with hangovers? America, you have failed me.”)
She landed on Hollywood’s A-list despite seeing herself as a “scrappy little nobody.” Now as her thirties come to a close, the Pitch Perfect star is fighting her way through imposter syndrome to make her mark as a director.
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Kendrick
BY galina espinoza | photographs by MICHAEL BUCKNER
Steps
Into Her Power
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I couldn’t tell you exactly when, but I remember kind of looking around at some point and going, Oh yeah, I'm I'm really operating from a platform of confidence.
Anna Kendrick
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Be healthy, but also hold on to our culture. So, yes, keep the soul food, but those are celebration dishes. Those are the dishes that we made on a Sunday or when somebody is celebrating a wedding or a birth or when they’re transitioning. We will not have lots of celebrations unless we live with the everyday.
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But present Kendrick with a probing question, and she’ll likely respond with a highly-descriptive story that allows you to envision exactly what she means. Take, for example, Kendrick’s response when asked if — as she wrote in her 2016 bestselling memoir, Scrappy Little Nobody — she still feels like “motherhood isn’t for me.” Many stars would respond with a simple “yes” or “no”; Kendrick, however, paints a picture so specific and thoughtful it could be turned into a clever video clip about how the unequal division of domestic labor is a big part of why she’s choosing a life without kids, a path that's increasingly known as “otherhood.”
“I was thinking recently about a phrase I've heard men say about their desire to have children in the future, and it occurred to me: I don't think I've ever heard a woman say that,” she begins. “And the thing they'll say is, ‘Yeah, maybe one day — a couple of kids running around.’”
Her mouth falls open in deadpan disbelief. “I don't think I've ever heard a woman say that!,” she continues. “Because it paints a certain visual, yes? That you come home at the end of your workday, and you put down your proverbial briefcase, and you're making yourself a cocktail, and a woman in a Laura Ashley dress is out in the yard, and there's a couple of kids — in white! — running around. Um, ‘Where are you in that, sir?’”
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She pauses, laughing. “I don't know, there's something about that phrase that really starts to rub me the wrong way. It's like when I hear husbands say they want to ‘help out’ with the kids. And it's two working parents! And I always want to kind of say something, and then I'm just like, ‘Well, I'm the childless cat lady. I'm not gonna say shit.’”
Yet as Kendrick makes clear in her new film, Woman of the Hour — in which she both stars and, for the first time, directs — she actually has a lot to say about how freely (and unfreely) women are able to move through the world. The movie, which debuted at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival to strong reviews and arrives on Netflix on October 18, comes with a compelling true crime hook: It details the almost–too-hard-to-believe real life story of a serial killer named Rodney Alcala, who in the 1970s, at the same time he was murdering and raping women, appeared as a contestant on a reality tv show called The Dating Game.
In Kendrick’s hands, however, Woman of the Hour is a horror story of a different kind, one that views the world through the eyes of ordinary women just trying to go about their daily lives only to find themselves constantly having to adjust their behavior — making themselves smaller, sweeter, more agreeable — so as not to risk the anger of men. “A lot of the conversations we had were about the risks we take with intimacy, and how you never really know who you’re going to get — in a really wonderful way, and in a really scary way, too,” says Woman of the Hour’s writer, Ian McDonald. “There was one scene where I’d written the character as kind of being really assertive, and Anna said, ‘I love that you see her as being so empowered. But if I’m stuck in a car in the middle of nowhere with a guy I don’t really know, I’m going to be super-duper nice.’”
Kendrick, who turned 39 in August, admits to having drawn from her own experiences, both professional and personal, while working on the film. A child actor who at the age of nine made her Broadway debut (and earned a Tony nomination) in High Society, Kendrick later starred in the Twilight anthology, scored an Oscar nomination for playing opposite George Clooney in Up in the Air, and became a bankable name with her memorable turn in the Pitch Perfect series. Yet even as her star rose, Kendrick struggled with “imposter syndrome,” she says, and with feeling like she was “failing” if she wasn’t “in some far-flung corner of the world with no friends and family just working on something.”
It wasn’t until the end of what she has publicly described as an emotionally abusive relationship sent her into psychotherapy that Kendrick was finally able to not only find her voice as an independent adult woman, but believe in it, too. “There was a real, positive outcome from a really terrible situation,” she reveals. “I had always felt like a mediocre student. I am often inarticulate and I cannot solve a math problem in my head to save my life! But psychotherapy taught me that when it’s a subject that really matters to me, I can be smart.”
AN ACCIDENTAL DIRECTOR
The disturbing story of Alcala, who was sentenced to death in California for the murders of five women but who was ultimately linked to as many as 130 killings, including of children, is the stuff of nightmares. Kendrick, who had to review crime scene photos and other ghastly material as preparation, admits to having “demoralizing moments,” while working on Woman of the Hour. “But I felt really carried through by the fact that this is based on real events and real injustices,” she says. “So I never really hit a point of going, What am I even making this for?, because the story feels so powerful.”
And personal. Robinson shares that, on set, Kendrick “talked a lot about her experience of being a woman in this industry. I imagine that starting at such a young age, you really have to be made of some stuff to feel like you can be heard regardless of when people brush you off. And she does that. She's a badass!”
Kendrick insists, however, that any displays of directorial confidence were at least partly an act. “On the one hand, I think [my] imposter syndrome is too pronounced,” she says. “On the other hand, I’d be a little worried if, directing my first movie, I had none. That would be a little batshit.” What helped her push past her doubts was a lesson she learned after struggling with imposter syndrome during the early years of her acting career: Just keep showing up.
It was her intelligent read of Woman of the Hour that convinced the movie’s creative team to put her in the director’s chair. Kendrick had already signed on to star in the film; when the original director dropped out, she decided to put up her hand as a replacement. “I thought, Okay — but what’s this going to look like?,” McDonald admits. “I was a big fan of hers as an actor, but as a director it was a big question mark.”
Kendrick quickly put any doubts to rest. On set, says co-star Nicolette Robinson, “She's so funny — she’s like, this tiny person with quirky energy. And it was just so cool to see this woman, half in costume, with her hair in rollers because she was about to do the next scene, but first she's directing this scene with a bunch of men surrounding her, being incredibly intentional and collaborative. I mean, it was just such good energy, which is really saying something given the intense material.”
“You know, sometimes I think that the general advice whenever we have any issue — whether it's imposter syndrome or just generally any insecurity — is to kind of therapy ourselves out of it,” she says. “That has its place, but sometimes I think it might be as simple as continued experience. Because with acting, I couldn't tell you exactly when, but I remember kind of looking around at some point and going, Oh yeah, I'm really operating from a platform of confidence. And that wasn't because I listened to a self-help tape about it. It was just starting to experience myself as someone who knew what she was doing.”
She got at least a small sense of what that might feel like in her role as director, when, after an early test screening of Woman of the Hour, the audience validated what she had most hoped to achieve with the film. “I'm sitting in the back listening, and one woman said that, you know, she thought every woman should see the movie,” Kendrick recalls. “And this man piped in and said, ‘I think every man should see this.’ I was trying to do, like, the tiniest celebration dance in the back of the theater. Because I really hope the movie gives men an insight into pieces of the female experience.”
Getting Off the "Hamster Wheel"
With Woman of the Hour about to drop on Netflix, Kendrick admits she’s been hounded with questions about what comes next for her — and that she doesn’t really have an answer.
Next August, she will turn 40, and while that’s an age at which many people start to panic about everything they haven’t yet crossed off their life checklist, Kendrick says the pending midlife milestone is having the opposite effect on her. Whether talking about her interest in having a long-term partner or her next acting project, Kendrick says, “I’m in more of a, ‘What happens, happens,’ place — about most things right now, I guess. I haven't really had the luxury of a five-year plan ever in my life. But I also confess that there's something about the idea of perpetual growth that bothers me, because no one means personal growth. They mean success, achievement, accolades.”
And while Kendrick admits those have been driving factors for her throughout most of her life, she is hoping that entering a new decade will help shift her perspective. “I'm worried that I'm coming across as though I'm trying to sound really enlightened,” she says, “and I guess it's more that I'm talking to myself and my own habit of getting back on the hamster wheel and then wondering why it's not making me happy.”
As for what does make her happy, Kendrick lists some simple pleasures, like Trapp Orange Vanilla Candles. “If you put me in a store and there's some candles on sale? Whoo, baby — there's gonna be nothing left!,” she says.
Then there’s the more serious stuff she’s hoping to tackle, like continuing to work in therapy on, “being the best friend that I can be, the best coworker that I can be. That feels really valuable to me.” Robinson says Kendrick more than met this aspiration on the set; recalling cast game nights that found the two of them paired up, “We just laughed at ourselves the whole time,” Robinson recalls. “It was a surprisingly joyful experience.”
It’s also an experience Kendrick hopes to repeat. “I would love to direct more,” she says, especially if it means she can surround herself with mostly female colleagues. “I just find women to be so much better at almost everything” — a sentiment she thinks more people in the movie industry are starting to share. “I was so used to being the only woman on set, because, you know, movies are populated with men and then, like, one chick,” she says. “But that has gotten leaps and bounds better.”
Still, if there’s one message Kendrick could leave women with it’s to not confuse improvement with equality. Reflecting on her own journey through midlife to a place where she is finally gaining in confidence, Kendrick says, “It’s like, yeah, we take all the crumbs. But no — we need to really have a big slice of cake!”
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It’s like, yeah, [women] take all the crumbs. But no — we need to really have a big slice of cake!
Anna Kendrick
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