All About Anna - Our exclusive interview with the Pitch Perfect star
Reasons to love Anna Kendrick #1
In the café of a dive bar in West Hollywood, she's telling me the story about being booked to perform at the Oscars. "They just emailed my publicist," she says in that brisk tone that helped her steal scenes in Up In The Air and Cake. "With something like that, they're all, 'Oh, we really hope you agree to this, and we'll run everything by you', and you're like, 'Um, I'm going to play along here and pretend I'm just mulling it over, but this is happening.'" She pauses for a beat, then deadpans: "Like, they could ask me to shit on stage and I'd do it."
Kim's bum might have broken the internet, but Anna's more likely to do it with her mouth. If you've ever looked at her Twitter feed, you already know her as the non-fool-suffering woman with the type of self-deprecating wit that lulls you into thinking that if you ever met her, you know you'd be best friends (albeit with you as the less funny one). She's the person who made that Ryan Gosling joke on Twitter ("Ugh - NEVER going to a Ryan Gosling movie in a theater again. Apparently masturbating in the back row is still considered 'inappropriate"'), which sent social media into a pearl-clutching meltdown, and she regularly Tweets things like: "For someone with such an intense need to be liked, you'd think I would have figured out how to be less of an asshole" to her 3.4million followers. She doesn't pander to anyone's ego, least of all her own. "What I think is really interesting is that people keep talking to me about my brand and persona and they're like, 'You're so down to earth.' Is the implication there that it's super cool of me not to be a psycho?" She throws me a wry look. "I guess that's the least I can do."
'The coolest girl on Twitter' isn't a moniker she's rushing to stake a permanent claim on. "I remember [George] Clooney [her co-star in Up In The Air] talking about Rosemary Clooney [his aunt] and saying that she was really popular and then suddenly she just wasn't that hot any more," she says, picking bits of lime pulp out of her sparkling water. "Nothing changed, she didn't forget how to sing, but suddenly people just cooled off on her. I'm always sort of prepared for that, so I'm not patting myself on the back for any of the social media stuff. I know that at some point people might just turn around and be like, 'I hate you.'"
Today we've walked (yes, in LA) the three blocks between the photo studio and the bar on Santa Monica Blvd we're now sitting in, which, coincidentally, is the place where Anna had her first legal drink as a 21 year old. She waited outside until the stroke of midnight on her birthday, when the bouncer could finally let her in. "I wanted to have a cocktail, but the people I was with said it was too embarrassing, so I probably just had a beer instead." This is a typical Anna Kendrick anecdote, one where she plays up her insecurities.
It's reason #2 to love her. She's always had more time for neurotic people than the confident, "especially when someone will point out that someone else has used a word wrong," she says. "I always think, 'Oh go fuck yourself. Do you know how embarrassed they are right now? Just let them figure it out three years from now when they hear someone else use the word.' The person who does that is the person who goes, 'I don't get embarrassed that easily.' I very briefly dated a guy who said, 'I don't get jealous, I don't get embarrassed, I'm basically the best man.' I thought, 'This isn't going to last very long.'"
For the audience, a film centred around what women do (and say) when men aren't looking - and had romance as a secondary theme - was refreshing, to say the least. Anna is more glib about its appeal. "You put together some singing and dancing and slick camera moves, and then throw in a couple of vagina jokes, and people like it," she cracks. More seriously, she credits scriptwriter Kay Cannon with its success, even if it means that since then Anna's been deluged with scripts that are basically Pitch Perfect-lite. "Kay's the reason I did the first movie and it's because the script is so much smarter than it even needed to be," she explains. "She fills every moment of her work with wit, whereas a lot of the scripts I'm sent are funny concepts, but lazy execution. A lot of people hand me a script in the tone of Pitch Perfect and I'm like, I think you're underestimating how much work went into how tight that script was."
She adds, "The weird thing is it happened so slowly. It made $65million [in the US], which is good but not great. It wasn't until VOD and iTunes that anybody thought about making it a franchise. There wasn't one moment where I thought, 'Ha! Women are a draw to the box office.' Hopefully this one will mean something to the people who work in business affairs." Still, she's pleased if it helped other female-driven movies get made. "You just want to make sure the movies getting made about women are elevated and not just low-stakes 'girl problems'."
Does she ever keep the Bechdel test - in which a story is rated by whether there are two or more female characters, who talk to each other about something other than a man - in mind when she's reading scripts? "Oh, I should, shouldn't I?" she cries. "Oh God. I'm trying to think what I'm reading at the minute. I've got a couple of things on my desk that it's so hard to choose between. Maybe that should be the decider." She shrugs. "Better than a coin toss."
Reasons to love Anna Kendrick #4: she genuinely eschews the fame game. "Part of it is because I'm dressed really boring in sweatpants and sneakers," she says, as to why she rarely gets papped. "So those pictures just don't sell. You need to be really styled - in the perfect leather jacket and little booties, and have your red lipstick and your coffee - and I haven't managed that yet. If I've got jeans on, it's a good day." (Today is a good day; she's paired them with a Breton top.) Dating outside the celeb pool also helps. Her relationship with cinematographer Ben Richardson is wonderfully low-key ("a pretty sweet situation," she quips). It helps that she doesn't take any of it too seriously. "I remember meeting Lena Dunham after she had done Tiny Furniture and I was asking her about doing press for something so personal. She said, 'Oh, I make up new stuff every time. I just say, everything in it is true, or everything in it is made up.' Because people reference things you say in interviews as if it's your definitive feeling. Half the time I don't know where a sentence is going when I start it."
She does take pains to carefully craft her Twitter gags, though. "The one thing I agonise over is how to make it make sense when you read it," she says. "People think, 'Is that too risqué? Is that too crazy?' But most of the time I don't have the instinct to post anything risqué."
So she still has a filter. "I don't know. Get me drunk and see what happens." Pleasingly, Anna seems to be one of the few famous people who not only admit to drinking socially, but also talk about hangovers the way a civilian would. Both are practically taboo in Hollywood. Anna agrees. "I went to this bar-tending class for a magazine interview and when I linked to it online, I said, 'I got drunk for this interview.' A bunch of outlets put headlines like, 'Anna Kendrick admits she got drunk.' But for me to admit it, doesn't that mean I need to deny it? I talk about it all the time, so why are you allowed to spin this as how I let everybody down? Sometimes I wonder, is it because I look young and people think I'm going down the path of the Lohan or something?"
In fact, this year Anna turns 30. "I feel like 29 is just total garbage, I'd rather just be 30 for two years," she says. "When I say I'm 29, I think I sound like I'm trying to make sure everybody knows I'm not 30." You don't look anywhere near 30, I tell her. "Yeah, I look like a teenager," she says. "I really like '50s-style dresses, but they make you look childish, and I don't want to look like one of those people trying to look like a little schoolgirl." Her aim for the next decade? "I'm trying to give a message to the world that I am a grown up." She gives a rebellious smile. "I'm a woman, here's my bitchy resting face."
If that's not reason #5 to love her, I don't know what is.
Pitch Perfect 2 is in cinemas from May 15
Matthias Vriens-McGrath
