Bellas pitch their best aca-memories
Nerds, it’s almost aca-over! The Barden Bellas hit their final notes in Pitch Perfect 3 (in theaters Friday). But before they go, the cast and producer Elizabeth Banks share their favorite memories of making the movies. Auditions: From Korean lullabies to ‘Cups’
Elizabeth Banks: “We were going to (have Beca) do I’m a Little Teapot in her audition sequence, something just snarky and not taking it seriously. And then we thought, let’s just do Cups.”
Anna Kendrick: “It was something that I learned to do seeing a link on Reddit, and because I’m a huge loser and a nerd, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m definitely going to
teach myself how to do that!’ And then when I was meeting about the movie, I was like, ‘ This is a thing I can do,’ and they wanted to put it in the movie.”
Banks: “But I think my favorite audition was Hana Mae Lee. She sang a Korean lullaby to us, but she turned around and faced the wall and sang it really small. It was very beautifully done, but it was so weird that we were like, ‘ We need this in the movie.’ ”
Meeting each other on the set in Louisiana
Brittany Snow: “I actually asked Anna Camp out on a girlfriend date the first day that we were there because we were playing best friends. I knew it was important for us to bond. I was really hoping that I liked her, and I asked her out to dinner. Within 10 minutes, I realized that we were going to be really good friends. And then it kind of became very odd how much we were hitting it off. We have the exact same sense of humor.”
Ester Dean: “It’s like going to school your freshman year. Me and Rebel, we just hit it off. We just sat and girl-talked between scenes. (But as a music producer), I was living a double life. I ended up writing Where Have You Been for Rihanna while I was doing Pitch Perfect. I was in the studio in the middle of the night making music.”
Bonding at camp in ‘Pitch Perfect 2’
Dean: “I had never been to camp. I was so scared to jump in the water because I can’t swim. They gave me a life vest, but every take Anna Kendrick would swim out there to pull me in. And I just thought to myself, ‘These are girls who will come and get you! They won’t watch you drown.’ ”
Kendrick: “There were a couple of us who are scared of heights, so we had to kind of coax them into (jumping), but it was really fun. Ester Dean is super-afraid of heights, so we were all cheering her on and were really proud of her.”
Hana Mae Lee: “When we’re ziplining through the water, my zip line just stopped maybe 20 feet away from the water and I had to jump. At that time I was wearing a wig, because I had blond hair. It felt like I was on those Japanese game shows.”
Shooting ‘Pitch Perfect 3’s emotional finale
Dean: “We got up (that) morning knowing that we leave. You were packing that morning to go home.”
Lee: “It felt kind of sad because it’s like if you went to school with your friends and now you don’t know where everyone is going to go. It felt like that.”
Snow: “We talk all the time about how weird it is, what would have happened if we didn’t do this movie. (Camp, who married co-star Skyler Astin) would have had a different life, husband. I would have not been in her wedding. My best friends are in this movie.”
The Bellas are crazy-generous
Dean: “I got everyone Valentine’s Day gifts with little things that vibrate! Because everybody was away from their boyfriends. I’m the kinky-gift giver. Rebel took all the girls to Cabo (San Lucas)! But I just couldn’t go (because) I went to work with Afrojack. I was so mad I missed it.”
Snow: “We all have specific wrap gifts that we give. Kendrick is usually very generous and sentimental. Rebel usually does extravagant trips. From the very beginning of filming, we start planning our wrap gifts. This year I got individual View(-Masters) made. I put inside jokes correlating with the pictures.”