Anna Kendrick acts, sings, writes, and has her millions of followers convinced that she’s the nicest star in Hollywood. But she’s a badass underneath it all, she tells Sanjiv Bhattacharya
I’M NOT meant to ask her about this – her publicists tell me “it’s embargoed” – but whatever. Anna Kendrick has a book of autobiographical essays out this November and she’s titled it Scrappy Little Nobody.
This from an Oscar-nominated actress and friend of George Clooney who has a trillion Twitter followers (actually 5.8 million). If she’s a nobody, then what hope for the rest of us? At what point does self-deprecation have exactly the opposite effect?
“What, like a false modesty thing? Like I’m fishing?” Her eyebrows are raised. She might actually be annoyed. “Should I have called it ‘Super Important Star’? Would that have made you happier?” Hmm, maybe.
“How about ‘I’m Obviously Amazing’ by Anna Kendrick?” And her irritation melts into a big smile. She cracks up laughing. “That’s actually quite good! Dammit! I want to change it now.”
We’re holed up in her publicist’s office on Wilshire Boulevard, and her schedule is murderous. The book is one of many reasons Kendrick is in demand right now – she’s also in The Accountant, opposite Ben Affleck, and the Dreamworks animation Trolls, alongside Justin Timberlake, which opened in East London yesterday. So as one reporter is flushed out, her people ferry me in and I find her in this bland corner cubicle by the window, a small birdlike creature, pale as paper, flicking through magazines. “No talking about the book, and no selfies,” I’m told. And the door closes behind me.
This isn’t quite Kendrick’s brand – the controlling handlers, the corporate setting, the production line approach. She’s known for being affable, downto-earth, one of the girls – that awful word: “real”.
We see Kendrick on chat shows and she’s a good laugh, rather like Jennifer Lawrence or Lena Dunham or Emma Stone, millennials who have rejected any kind of starry, diva persona for something much more relatable, and witty and adorable even – a proxy for regular girls everywhere.
“Yeah, me and Jennifer Lawrence and Lena Dunham, we all get together to figure out what would piss off journalists the most,” she says, grinning. “Like, ‘what if we say we’re all so normal and it drives everybody crazy?’.”
Being down-to-earth means laughing at being called downto-earth, because what other way is there to be? And anyway, it’s true – I’m here to report that Anna Kendrick, while not a nobody by any reasonable standard, is perfectly normal.
Exhibit A: she gets star-struck. One of her favourite stories is about how she met Beyonce and hyperventilated through the whole thing. It made for a popular Instagram post (nine million followers). “Should I not have been starstruck?” she says. “Should I have said, ‘I am your better, kneel to me?’” Ask her to name the single best thing about being famous and she says, without hesitation: “Kelly Clarkson tweeted at me once.”
There’s a theme here. Social media and singers – two Kendrick obsessions. She loves vocalists, being something of a singer herself. She’s all over the Trolls soundtrack. In fact, it was singing that got her started – a Broadway musical by the age of 12.
Her film debut was a musical too ( Camp ). For all her serious drama chops – Up In The Air, End of Watch – it was Pitch Perfect that established her as a bona fide box office draw, a musical comedy franchise about an acappella girl group that scored big with the Glee-slash-girlpower demographic. Pitch Perfect 3 is slated for next year, and Kendrick was reportedly paid $6-million (R84million) to star.
Which brings us to Exhibit B of Kendrick’s vaunted normality – she’s frugal. She drives a pre-owned Prius – her friend, the actress Aubrey Plaza, helped her negotiate the price at the dealership. She does her own shopping – “but I get a lot of yummy.com [grocery deliveries] because I’m lazy.” And she flies economy. Not even premium economy – if there’s one thing 5’2” Kendrick doesn’t need it’s extra legroom.
“Yeah, I’m a hero,” she says, laying the sarcasm on thick. “Actually that’s what me and Lena Dunham talk about: Let’s get a private plane, but tell people we fly economy so we can look like martyrs!” She shrugs. “But yeah sure, if I’m booking the ticket myself – it’s so expensive otherwise, it’s insane. I’d never spend that much on a few hours of my life.”
It’s not the money, it’s the principle. “Even if I had all the money in the world, it just seems wrong,” she says. These are the sensible, middle-class values she was raised with. She grew up in Portland Maine, with an older brother and two parents, now retired, who both worked in finance. Splashing money around just wasn’t their thing.
And anyway, she doesn’t get bothered in coach – she’s not the kind of celebrity people even notice. “I’m very small,” she explains. “With my sheet of hair that falls low over my face. And if I put a baseball cap on too, that’s it. Game over.”
Acting has its share of floaty creative types and needy egos, but Kendrick is neither. She has no need for frills or fripperies. She’s a pragmatist, a doer, a box ticker, a finisher. And it’s not always appreciated.
“My favourite qualities about myself are sometimes other people’s least favourite qualities about me,” she says, amused by the conflict. “I can be very exacting and practical, and sometimes in filmmaking, people want to just feel it and make magic happen.” Such as? “OK, so I know you’re trying to frame me saying this line with the horse coming through at the right time. So why don’t I just keep yelling the line, and when the horse comes through, we’ll have the shot? But lots of directors feel that’s not ‘art’. They think I’m being uppity. But if the horse needs to move through the frame let’s make it happen! I just want to execute the idea.”
That’s her favorite word – “execute”. When she’s executing she’s happy, and when she’s not? Not so much. “I can talk myself out of doing things sometimes,” she says. Sample tweet: ‘How long can you stay still before you develop bed sores? #MotivationMonday’. “But deep down, I want to get off my ass and do it.”
A case in point, this book we’re not supposed to be talking about. “It was f***ing hard to write,” she says. “It gave me newfound respect for writers, and also a bit of judgment – I think you have to be clinically insane to be a writer. There were moments when I cracked myself up though, so at least I can make myself laugh. Because at the end of the day I’m going to die alone, and I’d better have a good audience.”
Prior to the book, she’d only ever written tweets. But as the zillion people who follow her know, she’s rather good at those. Twitter is where Kendrick comes into her own, her sense of humour, most of all. Tweets like: “Bruno Mars would be the coolest hobbit in the shire” and “Does the food network use music recycled from 80s porn, or do I want to f*** that souffle?”
“People don’t always get them,” she says. “There was one where I thought ‘oh yeah, this is the one – they’re not ready for this!’ And it didn’t work at all. It was: ‘I hate it when you can tell a comedian has done something just for the material. Like going on a blind date, or having children.’ And everyone was like, ‘oh you mean how they all talk about airplane food?’ Um, no?”
Her vast social media following – more Twitter followers than the population of Denmark – could easily mean dollar signs if she so chose. Such is the Kimye universe in which we exist. But she’s yet to monetize her fans. To start posting images of Kendrick drinking a refreshing Diet Coke, for instance. It wouldn’t be on brand – she’s ironic, funny and essentially in it for the art not the cash.
And yet, there is a brand she’d happily sell out for, if only they’d call. “Intuition Razors for ladies,” she says. “They’ve got this block of solid shaving cream fitted in, so you can skip a step. Total. Gamechanger.”
She’d never imagined having a conversation like this when she was growing up in Portland. As a teenager, she’d alternate between “feeling painfully shy and being super outgoing”. And she still oscillates to this day. “I get terrible imposter syndrome – ‘this has all been a terrible mistake!’ – and then there are times when I think I have so much more to prove.”
But she didn’t expect this kind of success, or predict it. It certainly didn’t come easily. She threw herself into auditions in Los Angeles with a headgirly kind of spirit – get out there, do your best! But she isn’t a traditional stunner and she looked awfully young, so there were knockbacks, more than few.
“I remember once coming back for round two of auditions, and the place was closed, so I was literally peering through the glass. It turned out my agent just sent me the call time from round one by accident. So yeah, there were lots rejections and I had to go, ‘no, I’m definitely good at this, right?’ It helped knowing lots of other talented people who were also not working. Sometimes it’s just luck and timing.”
For Kendrick, the breakthrough was the George Clooney movie, Up in the Air, a fitting title for her career trajectory. She drove to a little bungalow in Venice and read her lines for a casting director and Jason Reitman, the director. “I thought, this is so above my pay grade, I won’t even bother imagining that I’ll get this job,” she says. And yet, months later she found herself starring opposite Gorgeous George. This is her favourite story.
“The hotel we were staying at had yoga classes, so I thought I might be good at that, I took dance as a kid. And on set, I was like, ‘yeah, I was doing this move with my leg over my shoulder’. Bragging, basically. And George said, ‘can you touch your head to your knees?’ I was like, no one can do that. And he did it right there in front of me. He basically folded himself in half. It’s really impressive. It was like, OK – so you’re better than me at everything.”
Kendrick’s still young, only 31. It wouldn’t be exactly shocking if, in a decade or so, another young actress spoke of her in much the same way. She does comedy, she sings, she writes books and she’s a serious actress. There’s not a lot on the Can’t Do list for this “little nobody”.
“I don’t know, there is a role I really want that I’ll probably never get,” she says. “I want to play a soldier in World War 2.”
Apparently she adores Band of Brothers – “it was one of my all time favourite entertainment things to happen”. And she’d quite like to be one of those brothers.
“Like Band of Brothers and A Sister or something. And don’t tell me I can play a nurse – that’s not the point. I’m talking about being heroic and shit. Risking my life for my country. The morality isn’t supergrey with World War II – not like modern wars which are ethically complicated and kind of a bummer. I want to be a badass.”
She picks up a copy of Vogue and opens it up to a spread of unfeasibly expensive handbags. Then Anna Kendrick, 5’2” musical theatre nerd, says: “I just want to kill Nazis.”
Trolls opened in East London yesterday. The Accountant premiers worldwide on November 4.