SwayBlog

Pitch Perfect 2’s Anna Kendrick is an expert in playing twitchy high-achievers with a hint of control freakery. In real-life she’s an endearing dork. She talks to Henry Barnes about passionate fans and Hollywood gender equality

Anna Kendrick catches me engrossed in a Vanity Fair spread on sex robots. A guy in California runs a factory that makes life-size erotic automata. You can buy them “natural” or hairless, busty or flat-chested. You choose from a range of nipple sizes and colours. The options are comprehensive, the nomenclature (“Mini 1”, “Perky 2”, “Super Puffy”) mind-boggling. “That’s interesting,” says Kendrick, taking a peek. “There’s such a thing as a ‘standard’ nipple.”

Kendrick is in London to promote Pitch Perfect 2 – the sequel to the hit comedy about an a cappella choir of lovable misfits. She is smart, fun, friendly company - the Hollywood star you wouldn’t mind catching you gawking at robo-boobs. No wonder people tend to think friendship with her is a given. In the past year, two fans have arrived at her door: one was a Pitch Perfect devotee, the other assumed they would be mates.

“It was weird because they don’t think you’re going to answer your own front door,” she says. “And I don’t think of myself as someone who has a fucking butler. It was as though they were saying: ‘Well, you answered the door!’ And I was like: ‘I thought you were UPS!’”

Kendrick’s charm makes some fans a little dizzy. They send her stuff in the post (“Like, lotions … I know!”). Not wanting to encourage anyone, she has a blanket policy of throwing all of it away. She once said she threw away diamond earrings. In fact, a quick Google revealed them to be fake – $200-a-pair.

All this unwanted attention is a side-effect of appearing in two hugely popular franchises: The Twilight Saga (in which she played Kristen Stewart’s steadfast sidekick, Jessica Stanley) and Pitch Perfect, where she plays Beca, an aspiring music producer who is seduced by the geeky thrill of competitive, collegiate a capella singing. Goofy and a bit gross (one of the best scenes is where a member of the choir makes a snow angel in a pile of vomit), the original Pitch Perfect took $113m (£71.5m) worldwide. Female film-goers made up 81% of the American box-office takings, with the majority of the crowd under 25. The film spoke to an audience who had been ignored by the sprawling, blokey comedies of Judd Apatow and the like, while Kendrick ascribes its popularity to the startling idea that young women might want to watch stories about them that don’t patronise or unrealistically sexualise them.

“When I was a kid I watched a terrible western with Drew Barrymore and Madeleine Stowe called Bad Girls,” she says. “It’s four women who are best friends and on the run from the law. It’s so bad, but I loved it, because I didn’t have depictions of strong female friendships to choose from. For young women to see female friendships in any form – particularly a broken ‘work in progress’ form – is something they respond to.”

Kendrick is quick to call Hollywood’s bullshit. She is part of a new generation of women in film (Jennifer Lawrence, Stewart, Emma Watson) campaigning for a less sexist industry. She refused to do a sexy pose for the Pitch Perfect 2 poster, instead opting for a cross-armed stance that was copied by fans in support. She has also whistleblown on gender inequality in casting. On a recent project, she had to wait for all the men to be cast before it was confirmed that she had got the part. As Kendrick put it: “What the fuck?!”

A self-diagnosed “real dick” on Twitter, she has built a devoted following by spinning a quirky line in self-effacement that neatly loops back to Pitch Perfect’s less-than-perfect heroines. The tweet she chose to pin to the top of her profile is characteristically frank, rude and entertaining: “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.”

She plays up her endearing dorkiness, but has got a sharp sense of what works for her audience. She once spent an afternoon copying a YouTube video of a teenage girl singing, while turning and tapping a plastic cup. Kendrick’s version of the party trick made it into Pitch Perfect as Beca’s audition scene. Cups, the pop song spinoff, sat in the Billboard chart for weeks, while the video is about to clock up 200m views on YouTube. She performed it on Letterman and got a standing ovation. “I’m amazing!,” she said, sarcastically, as the crowd applauded.

Today, she is fresh from a live Radio 1 interview where she cheerfully said “shit” on air without realising it was an issue. She zips into the room, tiny (she just scrapes 5ft 1in) and purposeful. Her handshake is huge. The air-conditioning is on and, dolled up for a video junket in Alexander McQueen, she is freezing. She runs to the loo and grabs a towel to wrap herself in. (“When it’s a print interview I’ll take the robe and wear it around, like this insane Barbra Streisand-esque diva.”) She’s up for answering anything except whether – like her Pitch Perfect character – she enjoys watching porn (“What an uncivilised thing to ask me. We’re in a nice hotel!”).

Pitch Perfect 2 is looser and sloppier than its predecessor, the free jazz workout to the first film’s perfect pop song. The Bellas, in disgrace after their force-of-nature soloist Fat Amy accidently flashes her vagina at Barack Obama, are sent to compete at the world a cappella championships to restore their reputation. Both films are less about plot than the relationships within the all-female choir, remarkable considering the non-fiction book the franchise is based on reveals a cappella to be as jockish as college football. Author Mickey Rapkin describes a scene at one concert where a soloist has hit a particularly tough note. Another member of the choir runs out behind him and draws a box in the air around his head.

“Box is slang for female anatomy,” writes Rapkin. “This bit of sign language means that whoever is singing right then just did something so spectacular, so worthy of celebrating, that inevitably that night a stranger will offer him, well, her box.”

“Like a rock star panty-dropper situation?” says Kendrick. “It would offend me if I thought a guy like that was even vaguely intimidating, but it’s a fucking a capella singer. You’re a male a capella singer and you have the balls to say you deserve pussy? Oh boy.”

Born in 1985, Kendrick grew up in a coastal town near Portland, Maine. Her dad was a history teacher, her mum an accountant. They instilled in their daughter the desire to be busy, an ethos that has kept her on movie sets for the past six months. She is not afraid of being in bad movies (“Everybody’s tried to have a perfect career. No one in the history of Hollywood’s succeeded”), but she is scared of not working.

From the age of 10, her mum and dad would drive her the five and a half hours to theatre auditions in New York. The mileage paid off when she landed a part in the Broadway show High Society, for which she earned a Tony nomination at the age of 12. She didn’t go to college (“delinquent”), but broke into film with Camp – an indie comedy about the backstage machinations at a performing arts summer school – and Rocket Science, in which she played the motormouthed captain of a high school debate team. Her first two films set the template for the classic Kendrick role: twitchy high-achievers with a hint of control freakery. Juno director Jason Reitman tapped into that type-A tendency when he wrote a part specifically for her in Up in the Air, as a downsizer butting heads with George Clooney over the best way to fire a workforce. Kendrick, who was so nervous she had to practise lines with Clooney between takes, gave the veteran smoothy a run for his money. She was nominated at the 2010 Oscars for best supporting actress, losing out to Precious star Mo’Nique. The nomination bumped her to a higher level that she wasn’t quite ready for.

‘Before Up in the Air came out I just kept expecting the Hollywood coaches to swoop in to tell me what the hell to do,” she says. “The year that Charlize Theron won the Oscar for Monster [2003] was my first year in LA as a deeply unemployed actor. And in my imagination there was a team of people around her working her out and taking her to the spa and sticking her in the secret machine that no one else knows about except for Hollywood stars that turns you into a perfect version of yourself. When I was nominated, I was like: ‘Isn’t someone going to tell me not to eat this bag of Cheetos?’”

If the real-girl-in-la-la-land persona is is a schtick, it is hard to spot. However, a colleague who did a video interview with her for the Disney musical Into the Woods remarked on Kendrick’s ability to leap into camaraderie when the camera started rolling, then switch off with the little red light. An admirer of Marlene Dietrich, Kendrick has talked about mastering the art of understanding the process of film-making in order to give a better performance. These days the process of film-making includes publicity. Today, she seems to carry an iron-willed determination to be as nice and honest as the situation allows, right until our 30 minutes are up.

Joe Swanberg, who directed two of Kendrick’s best performances (in the low-budget improvised comedy dramas Drinking Buddies and Happy Christmas) says it is her ability to engage in a job and then switch off that makes her special.

“When I was casting Drinking Buddies, I would ask actors what they’d be doing if they weren’t acting,” he says. “It was suprising how many people drew a blank. Somebody like Anna could have six answers to that. For me, that means: ‘When I point a camera at you and you have to make it all up, you will have things to say.’

“Her personal life does not seem dominated by the movies,” he adds. “There are kids who grew up with sort of normal parents and a sort of a normal life, and then there’s people who grew up in proximity to the industry. There’s a different flavour to those people. She’s stayed mentally hungry and interested in the world”.

Post-PP2, Kendrick will be starring alongside Ben Affleck in assassin thriller The Accountant. She is also writing a book, commissioned off the back of her savvy tweeting and based on her experiences in Hollywood. Her house is “A Beautiful Mind situation”, she says. Notes everywhere, ideas up the wall.

“I keep waking up to things written on my phone or on a pad by my bed that’s like: ‘Lima beans, Calvin, corset,’” she says. And I’m like: ‘What did that mean?!’ At the time I remember thinking: ‘Got to tell that story!’”

Her mum is trying to help focus her attention by emailing her own anecdotes.

“They’re all stories that a mother tells about that time her daughter was an absolute angel,” says Kendrick. “She said it was because she wanted people to know that I was a good person. That implies that I don’t come off like a good person, which is fair enough. But I can’t tell stories about that time I did something really nice for someone. I have to tell stories about the time I was a fucking idiot. And there are plenty … luckily.”

Interview over. Kendrick leaps from the sofa, dumps the towel and palms a quick, loose handshake. She makes for the door with barely a goodbye. The schedule is full and the work is waiting. She is off to make another new friend.

• Pitch Perfect 2 is on general release in the UK
  

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