With six film releases this year, over 3m Twitter fans hanging on her every word and George Clooney as her number one fan, it’s little wonder that actress ANNA KENDRICK is the woman we all want to be friends with, finds EMILY CRONIN.
Anna Kendrick walks into a bar. Technically, it’s a restaurant, but one that happens to be serving only dessert and drinks right now, which is just fine with Kendrick. “Dessert but nothing else? That’s kind of my dream,” she says.
Sidling into her chair, Kendrick – freshly blown-out hair, camera-test-ready makeup, street-style-proof outfit – radiates a surprising glossiness and a not-at-all-surprising aura of success. She is a classic triple threat: an Academy Award-nominated actress and a Broadway-caliber singer who can dance, too. So much untrammeled talent might be daunting in one person, if Kendrick wasn’t so brilliantly feisty. She has picked up a reputation as the queen of LOL-inducing, compulsively retweetable tweets (to wit: “My Patronus is a corgi”), and in person, she doesn’t disappoint – a tiny thing with a huge laugh, unafraid of dropping a ‘f**k’ or 15 into conversation, and the first to suggest an early afternoon drink.
All that talent and candor make Kendrick a new sort of Hollywood heroine: her fans, rather than dreaming about being Anna Kendrick, dream of being her friend. “There’s everything to like about Anna,” confirms George Clooney, who starred opposite the 29-year-old in 2009’s Up in the Air. “She’s wildly talented, smart, and great fun to be around. And she’s going to be around for a long time.”
Kendrick hasn’t stopped working since her first Broadway role, aged 12. Since then, she has played a downsizing specialist in Up in the Air; a rookie psychologist in 50/50; a pregnant food-truck chef in What to Expect When You’re Expecting; and – in one Saturday Night Live sketch – Ariel, the Little Mermaid. She also accomplished the not insignificant feat of making college a capella seem cool, as Becca Mitchell in Pitch Perfect. (To the delight of fans who think the ‘Barden Bellas’ are just aca-awesome, they’re returning to screens in Pitch Perfect 2 this May.) “Kendrick is such an amazing singer, the epitome of ‘pitch perfect’,” says co-star Rebel Wilson. “She crushes it just as hard as an actress as she does as a singer. It’s incredible to watch.”
Between Into the Woods, the Pitch Perfect movies, and the upcoming The Last Five Years, Kendrick is living out every musical-theater geek’s dreams. “Big-time, right? I’m so greedy. I don’t know why they keep letting me do them,” she says with a smile. The highest-profile role in her movie-musical trifecta is that of Cinderella, in Into the Woods. Stephen Sondheim’s fractured fairy-tale picked up where some of the world’s best-known children’s stories leave off, after all the Happily Ever Afters. While Cinderella can be the picture of passivity – a woman who ‘wins’ only because she gets the guy – Kendrick found strength in the character. “My favorite part about her is that she leaves the prince and does it with compassion,” she says. “She doesn’t have a lot of time for judgment in her life and in her heart.”
Yet even more exciting for Kendrick than all the ball-gowns was the chance to work with Meryl Streep, who plays the Witch. “She’s amazing and she brings so much strange vulnerability to the role,” says the young actress. Her other heroines tend to be “women who are willing to show themselves and be honest, and be a little ugly”, namely comediennes such as Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer, Chelsea Peretti and friend Aubrey Plaza. “I love it when people don’t want things to be polite and comfortable,” Kendrick says. “Sometimes I catch myself self-censoring in that way, where it feels like I’m being kind of edgy and subversive, but I know that I’m not; I know that I’m playing it safe.”
Kendrick pushes herself closer to that edge through her Twitter account. As @annakendrick47, she’s quippy and self-deprecating. Lines such as “If the frosting has cream cheese it counts as breakfast, right?” and “I’m so humble it’s crazy. I’m like the Kanye West of humility,” rack up retweets by the thousands. “I love seeing what people respond to and think is funny; it’s kind of a puzzle. Trying to express yourself in 140 characters can be this little word game,” she explains. Kendrick regularly puts her tweets through multiple drafts before sending them out into the ether. “Some people play Candy Crush; I try to perfect my tweets,” she justifies.
It’s clear that Kendrick’s voice is all her. Could it also be, at least subconsciously, a disarming tactic, a way to show fans and followers that she’s ‘normal’? “I guess, maybe…” She pauses. “It feels dishonest to me to let anybody in the world think that my farts smell like lavender, or something,” she shrugs, and takes another sip of her ginger margarita.
Next up, Kendrick plays Cathy Hiatt in The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown’s cult musical about a marriage and its dissolution. It is a vocally demanding role and Kendrick more than holds her own opposite stage actor Jeremy Jordan. In one scene, Kendrick, as actress Cathy, sings a stream-of-consciousness litany of insecurities while onstage at an audition, from “I should stop... I should have stopped,” to “Don’t look at my shoes, I hate these shoes.”
“That’s exactly what happens at every audition!” Kendrick exclaims. “There were so many auditions where I’d leave, and it was like I had blacked out. All I remembered was walking in and walking out.”
Her Broadway debut in 1998’s High Society, aged 12, earned Kendrick a Tony nomination, making her the third-youngest nominee in the history of the awards. She stayed in the theater until moving to Los Angeles for a TV pilot when she was 17. That pilot fizzled, but Kendrick stayed, taking cater-waitressing gigs to see her through the lean months. “I kept wishing, when I got these jobs that were barely enough to keep me afloat, could they just keep me a little more afloat? Maybe a little more than the bare minimum I need to keep the lights on?”
It was only two years ago (around the time her song Cups from Pitch Perfect made the Billboard Hot 100) that Kendrick finally disposed of her catering clothes. She had held onto the polyester pants and white shirt almost as a subconscious safety net. “It was this underlying sense of, ‘Well, I definitely have to keep those, in case I need the extra cash,’” she says.
Those days are very much behind her, especially as Kendrick’s endless stream of projects doesn’t leave her much time for trips home, let alone catering bookings – she has at least six films slated for release in 2015. But while she is relishing her current moment, Kendrick is also looking forward to maturing in the industry. “I know that things will be more complicated as an older actress, in ways that I can’t anticipate, but I would really enjoy getting to the point where the reason I’m getting roles or not isn’t based on if somebody thinks I’m hot enough,” she says. “I feel like I’ve always been a character actress, and this is a blip in my career where I’m playing the ingénue. I’ll be a lot more comfortable and get excited when I’m playing women who aren’t supposed to be pretty.”
Her focus flickers over my shoulder, toward something at the bar. She narrows her eyes and tilts her head, peering closer. Then she gets it. “Oh my God, that was someone pretending to take a selfie!” she stage whispers, stifling a giggle. “That’s my favorite. It’s one thing when somebody is going ‘click, click, click’,” she says, miming a sly iPhone photo by her hip, “but when you’re doing a pretend selfie, and I can see myself in your phone?” And the movie star slaps the table, and gets the last laugh. Just as you’d expect.
The Last Five Years is out Feb 13.
