Anna Kendrick Opens Up About Surviving 'Emotional Abuse & Psychological Abuse' in Previous Relationship

Anna Kendrick is opening up.

In a new interview, the 37-year-old actress said that she really “resonated” with playing a woman stuck in an emotionally abusive relationship in her upcoming movie Alice, Darling.

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In the movie directed by Mary Nighy and written by Alanna Francis, Anna plays Alice, “a woman stuck in an emotionally abusive relationship to her successful boyfriend, Simon (Charlie Carrick). To her friends, played by Kaniehtiio Horn and Wunmi Mosaku, Alice seems distressingly distant during a birthday trip. As Alice slowly unravels as a result of the mind games Simon has played on her, her friends try to intervene and help,” according to People.

While promoting the movie ahead of its premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival this weekend, Anna revealed that she suffered “abuse” right before taking on the role.

“I was coming out of a personal experience with emotional abuse and psychological abuse,” Anna recalled to People about the first time she came across the screenplay. “I think my rep sent it to me, because he knew what I’d been dealing with and sent it along. Because he was like, ‘This sort of speaks to everything that you’ve been talking to me about.’”

“It felt really distinct in that I had, frankly, seen a lot of movies about abusive or toxic relationships, and it didn’t really look like what was happening to me,” Anna continued. “It kind of helped me normalize and minimize what was happening to me, because I thought, ‘Well, if I was in an abusive relationship, it would look like that.’”

While describing her former relationship, Anna said, “I was in a situation where I loved and trusted this person more than I trusted myself. So when that person is telling you that you have a distorted sense of reality and that you are impossible and that all the stuff that you think is going on is not going on, your life gets really confusing really quickly.”

She continued, “And I was in a situation where, at the end, I had the unique experience of finding out that everything I thought was going on was in fact going on. So I had this kind of springboard for feeling and recovery that a lot of people don’t get.”

Anna went on to say that after the relationship ended, she took time to understand “what really happened” in her relationship, adding that it was “the hardest task of my adult life.”

“My body still believes that it was my fault,” Anna shared. “So even with this concrete jumping off point for me, to walk out of that relationship knowing that I wasn’t crazy, it’s incredible the way that recovery has been so challenging.”

Anna also said that her role in Alice, Darling marks the first time she’s taken on a project that was so relevant to her.

“Usually, it’s just I read a good script and I like the people involved, and I make the movie. And it was really surprising timing that we found this script at that moment in my life,” Anna explained. “And in fact, I remember my first Zoom meeting with Mary Nighy, the director, disclosing to her what I was going through. And I even said to her, ‘This all happened very recently. In fact, it happened so recently that if the movie was shooting in a month, I probably shouldn’t do it.’ But it was many, many months away. So I wasn’t in danger of re-traumatizing myself. But yeah, it’s certainly a unique experience.”

Anna concluded by saying that making the movie “felt incredibly cathartic.”

“But like so many things in life, I think the piece that was most therapeutic was actually building relationships with these collaborators and sharing our personal histories with each other, and then creating this thing together,” Anna said.