Anna Kendrick was in fine form Sunday afternoon as the U.S. star continues to traverse the festival circuit with Babies.
At a Zurich Film Festival masterclass session, Kendrick took an adoring crowd through the early years of her career all the way to an Oscar nomination for Up in the Air, as well as stories from her time on Pitch Perfect, A Simple Favor, and her directorial debut, 2023’s Woman of the Hour.
Host Max Loong kicked off by asking about Kendrick’s beginnings in Maine, where she grew up, and how her starring role in Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air — opposite George Clooney — came to be. In those early auditions, an unsuspecting superpower came from Kendrick’s radical modesty. “Any time in my career where I just thought, ‘Well there’s not a shot in hell that I’m gonna get this job,’ I do absolutely my best work — because you’re relieved of the stress of it,” explained the actress.
Kendrick found herself taking the character where she wanted to go instead of what the casting director was imagining. “If I’d known there was a real interest in me, I would have absolutely bungled the read,” she said about trying for the role of the ambitious, no-nonsense Natalie in the comedy-drama. “Because I just thought, ‘Obviously, they’re gonna hire someone incredibly classy.’ I went in and did an awkward, goofy read, and that’s what got me the job because nobody else did the audition that way,” she said.
Oddly enough, Twilight (2009) came to Kendrick in a similar manner. “I play one of the friends at school, but I think in the book and in the script [the character, Jessica] was described as this tall, blonde, athletic, kind of popular girl. So again, I was like, why the fuck am I here?” Kendrick recalled. “I remember I ran into Mae Whitman in the waiting room before the audition, and we were both like, ‘What are we doing here?’ So again, you go in and you’re like, ‘What if I just did it really weird and funny?’”
She gushed over working with a cinematic icon so early in her career, describing Clooney as “everything that you would hope George Clooney would be. He is charming, funny, mischievous, whiskey-drinking, gorgeous.” She said on their first day of filming, Clooney sweetly told her he still gets a little nervous starting out on a project. It wasn’t until later Kendrick realized he was faking it to soothe her anxiety: “It was just such a total act of generosity, [and] speaks so well of him,” she said.
As the conversation continued, Loong got Kendrick speaking about her rise to fame — including her very of-the-era popularity on Twitter — and being repeatedly offered the same kind of role. “I remember someone who had worked with Meryl Streep was like, ‘Even now, in Meryl’s career, she will just get a deluge of offers for the exact character that she just played.’” It helped Kendrick feel better to think that even the greatest actress of her generation could be cornered by creative short-sightedness. In a rejection of that very notion, she signed onto Seth Rogen’s 50/50.
Naturally, Loong asked if there were any Pitch Perfect fans in the room. Kendrick was as charming as ever as she reflected on that whirlwind period releasing the franchise-spawing a-capella comedy, which earned her a platinum record (for the notorious “Cup” song, which peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100) that she could hang in her house: “Like I’m 50 Cent!”
Universal even asked her to record a full-length version of the song and make a music video. “I thought, ‘What a waste of money,’” Kendrick remembered. “Suddenly this movie — that did just okay at the box office. There’s been a kind of revisionist history where people think of it as this sleeper hit and this box office smash, which it simply was not. It did fine [over $114m], but it wouldn’t have gotten a sequel off the strength of the box office numbers — was so in the air and talked about, and it was really bizarre.”
Not to sound too corny, Kendrick added, but she and her nine co-stars, including Anna Camp and Brittany Snow, are still incredibly active on the Pitch Perfect group chat and provide a support network for one another to this day — kind of like the Avengers, apparently. “When someone in the group chat tells us something difficult is happening, it’s like, ‘Okay, who’s going over to her house tomorrow? What are we doing? How are we figuring this out?’ It’s beautiful,” Kendrick said.
The hour-long discussion took Kendrick to her book, Scrappy Little Nobody, which is an experience she won’t be repeating any time soon (“I’m so sorry. I hated it. I’m obviously very proud of the book, but I’m not cut out to be a writer”), and seeing Henry Golding go from nervous up-and-comer to full-fledged movie star between A Simple Favor (2018) and Another Simple Favor (2025).
She touched on making the spontaneous decision to jump into directing with Woman of the Hour, which involved a lot of reassurance from Snow, who had around the same time made her filmmaking debut. “I really started to panic right before we started prep, so I Googled, ‘How to direct a movie,’” Kendrick confessed. “[Snow] was like, ‘I did the same thing!’ And then we had the identical experience of reading a thing and watching a video, and going, ‘Not only do I know all the things you’re talking about, [but] that’s not how it works!’”
Unfortunately, Kendrick didn’t talk about her next directorial feature, the hotly anticipated adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, except to say she was “over the moon and so excited” for the project. The script is written by Liz Tigelaar (Little Fires Everywhere, Casual) with current revisions by Francesca Sloane (Mr. & Mrs. Smith). Jenkins Reid will executive produce the adaptation, per Netflix.
With Babies, which has brought her and director Lauren Miller Rogen to the Swiss film festival, Kendrick and Rogen’s husband (you guessed it, Seth Rogen) play a happily married couple, surrounded by friends with kids, who are forced to confront their indecision about becoming parents when their divorced friend and her daughter move in.
Kendrick told the room that the relationship with long-time friend Rogen in the film is “just based on how he is with Lauren.” She continued: “They just have one of those relationships where you’re like, ‘God.’ They just make it look so easy. It’s so simple. They genuinely just prefer to be around each other than not be around each other. It’s not complicated.” On Kendrick’s public statement that she doesn’t intend to have children, she responded: “I probably just shouldn’t have said anything.”
Finally — a big question — how does Kendrick stay true to herself in an industry where everyone has an opinion on her? “I’ll try to answer this truthfully, even though it is cringy and embarrassing,” she began. “Social media became so prominent and Twitter was [getting popular] exactly when Up in the Air started, and there was something about that website where people could smell on you if you weren’t being authentic.”
It was a little like promoting Up in the Air, explained Kendrick. “I did press for that movie for about six months, and it really started to mess with my head because I felt like I was representing this film that’s this substantial, classy film. It has George Clooney in it, for heaven’s sake, and I felt like I had to be Miss America [with a] perfect, pageant-ready answer.”
Social media, at the time, allowed her to be her “messy” self. “I know it’s become something really complicated and dark now,” she continued about the same platforms. “But it also meant that I didn’t have to rely on a TV interview to put something out into the world of my honest thoughts, which then meant that when I would meet someone in real life who knew me from movies, particularly once Pitch Perfect came out and there were young women talking to me all the time, it meant that I could be a really real version of myself without worrying that I was offending them or letting them down somehow because they’d seen my personality online. That’s a really weird thing to reconcile with the way that social media is now.”
The 22nd Zurich Film Festival runs Sept. 24-Oct. 4.
