Anna Kendrick’s haunting drama Alice, Darling will soon debut in theaters, and the film focuses on a young woman in an emotionally abusive relationship, which is something that Kendrick has been through and openly discussed in the recent past.
Kendrick also recently opened up about the experience of making the movie and how it impacted her emotionally, as a survivor of abuse. “I actually was surprised that I’ve been finding the press much more challenging than making this movie,” the actress told Rolling Stone this week. “I figured that out relatively quickly and made some changes.”
Despite the intense subject matter, Kendrick has been sharing her story of fleeing an abusive relationship in order to help others. She mentions that one of her former co-stars and close friends, Aubrey Plaza, was one of the people to help her remove herself from an abusive relationship, thanks to their unique friendship. “I was texting with her this week. I think she’s brilliant and we’re both avoidants, so I think it’s hard for two avoidants to maintain a friendship, but I also think that’s why our friendship has endured, in a sense. We can both give each other a ton of space,” the actress explained.
Kendrick then recalled Plaza encouraging her to get out of the toxic relationship. “I do remember talking to her a little bit about what was going on. But even then, I bet if I read through those texts I could see that I was testing the waters about how much I could say before she tells me, ‘You really have to get out’ — which at that time, I’m embarrassed to say, was unacceptable to me,” Kendrick explained. Alice, Darling shows the toll abuse has on the body and mind after being in a toxic relationship for so long. In the film, Alice’s friends make an effort to help her get away from her boyfriend, which is similar to what happened with her friends in real life.
Even though Kendrick didn’t listen to her advice at first, looking back, she knows that her friends were right, “I was always trying to tell people what was going on in a way where they’d give me some magic piece of advice, but not to where they’d give me the truth, which was: ‘You have to leave.’ I just couldn’t hear it.”
Today, Kendrick seems to be on a creative hot streak. Her project The Dating Game is moving forward, which she found out about after being stuck in an elevator at TIFF. Things can only go up from here. Or down, in the elevator situation.