“It feels very personal”: Anna Kendrick on coercion, not wanting children and a film about dating a murderer | Anna Kendrick

TIt may be the year of the childless cat lady, but Anna Kendrick isn’t ready to team up with Taylor Swift just yet. “I never think about having children, so I think I spend just as little time thinking about using it as a weapon,” she says from the kitchen of her Los Angeles apartment, clutching her gray cardigan tightly. One of the takeaways from the 39-year-old actress’s genuinely funny 2016 book “Scrapy Little Nobody,” in which she decries the inherent craziness of the film industry and her place in it, was: “Anna Kendrick in ‘Doesn'” “I do no child shock!” As she later explained, each of her children would end up being just “another child for your child to fight when the water wars come.”

She now sounds like someone even JD Vance can’t understand: a woman who makes no apologies for not wanting to have either child still Cats. “That’s the best argument for why I don’t have kids,” she says, then explains how she recently found herself nodding off to the sound of TikTok cat videos. “I thought, ‘With the weight of a cat, I would fall asleep easier.’ But I’m not responsible enough to own a cat. “Someone should really build a robot cat that does all the purring and kneading.” And then I thought, wait, I’m not even up to the “cat lady” part yet! Why would anyone trust me with one? child?”

Trust her with a film and there will be no complaints. An actress since childhood (she was nominated for a Tony Award at age 12), Kendrick rose to fame in the series “Pitch Perfect” and “Twilight” and was recognized for her role as an ax wielder opposite George Clooney in “Up in the Air.” “nominated for an Oscar. Now she has directed her first feature, “Woman of the Hour,” a factually inspired thriller about Rodney Alcala, the serial killer who appeared in 1978’s “The Dating Game,” the U.S. prequel to the British series “Blind Date.”

It was always planned for Kendrick to co-produce the film and play Cheryl Bradshaw, the aspiring actress and dating game contestant who chose Alcala as her preferred bachelor. But when the project, which had been in the works for two years, suddenly had a start date and no director, Kendrick volunteered. She also came up with the title of the film. “There’s something perverse and ironic about Woman of the Hour,” she says. “This is supposedly Cheryl’s moment, but she is an object of consumption and objectification.”

Although the film doesn’t skimp on horror and suspense, especially in the torturous final sequence, it lacks the glee that is typical of serial killer stories. That’s partly because this isn’t really Alcala’s story, but rather a record of the courage and even ingenuity of the women who fell under his spell.

Kendrick was determined to treat each of them with dignity. “There was a moment when I was talking to the cameraman about a shot and I realized that what he was suggesting was very clever,” she remembers. “It would have been singled out by people and talked about. But I felt we couldn’t do that to the actress. I didn’t want to photograph anyone in a way that would offend me.”

Many of the themes in the film tie directly into those in her book, such as the pressure on women in the entertainment industry – and society as a whole – to be compliant and obedient in order to avoid being labeled difficult. These concerns were already woven into Ian McDonald’s script, but Kendrick teased out a theme that might not have occurred to a man: the way women communicate the dangers and discomforts they face in the presence of men are.

“The only clue I had for the author was, ‘You’re giving women too much agency,'” she says. “That sounds strange, because writers want to give their characters agency. You are constantly being pushed to do just that. But there is a strange secret language between women. There are certain things I wouldn’t risk saying to a man if we were alone, like, “Hey, you make me uncomfortable.” It really speaks well of Ian that he wanted to give women that freedom of choice, but I felt like it would be more honest if they didn’t express exactly what was going on inside them.”

A typical example is the scene where Cheryl is having a drink with Alcala at a bar and he urges her to stay another round. “I rewrote it the night before filming,” says Kendrick. “There used to be this moment where the waitress knocked over the drinks and Rodney got kind of aggressive. But suddenly it didn’t feel right.” Now Cheryl finds an escape route by subtly signaling the waitress, who lies on her behalf and says the bar is closing. “What is happening will be very clear to most women. And if it flies over a man’s head, that’s nothing I’m worried about.”

The parallels between the Hollywood of the 1970s shown in the film and the more recent past cannot be overlooked, especially when Alcala admiringly mentions by name Roman Polanski, who drugged and raped 13-year-old Samantha Geimer in 1977. “One scene that was cut showed some of Rodney’s colleagues chatting about the Polanski case,” says Kendrick. “We took it out because it appeared to be related to the murders. But people chatted about these things at the water cooler like it was a moral gray area and not a damn crime.”

As recently as 2010, the topic was still lightly discussed in Hollywood, she says. “I remember having to choose my words very carefully at parties so as not to upset people when I pointed out that she was 13 and couldn’t possibly agree. It’s easy to forget how casually people would apologize for things like that.”

More traces of Kendrick’s experiences in the industry have found their way into “Woman of the Hour.” As a child actress, she was once told by a casting director to smile because she didn’t seem very happy. (“I wasn’t that good at doing the ‘cheesy little kid’ thing,” she said in 2012.) In the film, Cheryl faces exactly that pressure. There’s also an audition scene where she’s asked if she’s willing to perform nude. “Ah, no,” says Cheryl. “Not for me.” The male casting director points to her breasts and says reassuringly, “Oh, I’m sure they’re fine.”

“This is taken verbatim from something that happened to me when I was 19,” she says. As she begins to change the subject, her voice falters and she pulls her cardigan over her face. “Oh man,” she says, fighting a sudden outburst of emotion. She has briefly burst into tears several times during our conversation, but only in joyful contexts, such as when she expresses how proud and protective she feels toward Autumn Best, who is stunning as the teenage runaway who falls into Alcala’s clutches.

This is different. I ask if she is okay. “Yes,” she says, laughing about it. “Yeah. I’ve, um…I’ve had experiences where I found out there was a wardrobe change where the costume designer was reticent, probably because her hands were tied. It’s like you’re not paying attention to it the reason can be: “Wait – sorry – um, Why Would I wear a swimsuit in this scene? But I’m grateful that this happens much less often now. And when you say you feel uncomfortable, there is more of a culture of taking it seriously.”

If “Woman of the Hour” represents a new maturity in Kendrick’s work, it doesn’t come out of the blue. When I ask whether the film has, it seems, anything to do with “Alice, Darling,” the disturbing 2022 drama in which she played a woman in a forced relationship, she nods emphatically. “Exactly right,” she says. “I just couldn’t identify with everything else I was dealing with at the time. And suddenly there are these two really dark scripts with themes that feel very personal. I don’t think it was a coincidence that I replied to them.”

What she saw in the script was her traumatic experience of living in a forced relationship for five years. This made her more determined to appreciate the complexity on screen. At every point where Alice’s boyfriend’s behavior could have been made clear or explicit, Kendrick objected. She was even in the editing room and asked director Mary Nighy: not explaining what happened so that the audience questions Alice’s interpretation as much as she doubts herself. After all, part of the insidious terror of a forced relationship is its nebulous quality. For Alice, there are no bruises to measure the abuse, just a constant low hum of fear.

Shortly after making “Alice, Darling,” Kendrick said her body “still believes that.” [the abuse] was my fault,” explaining that “recovery was so challenging.” How does she feel now?

“I have good days and bad days,” she says. “But it’s more accurate to call them good months and bad months. If you had asked me three years ago, I would have said that it was something almost embarrassing. Like, “Aren’t you over it now?” But I think I’ll feel a lot grosser if I say, “I’m great.” When we talk in another five years, please God, tell me that I Then you don’t still have problems, you know? I don’t know how much of that feeling comes from my pure desire to feel good as opposed to, ‘That would mean I’m such a weakling.’ It’s still swirling somewhere in there.”

Your therapist has a term for it. “She says, ‘Grief has tentacles.’ That is, when there is a minor challenging event in the present, it harkens back to more difficult things in the past. Sometimes I feel like this special event in my life is with me all the time and I wish I could just put it aside.”