Actor and Director Anna Kendrick: Life Imitates Art

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Anna Kendrick (Pitch Perfect, Up in the Air) has been a fixture in Hollywood for the past fifteen years. She joins us this week to discuss Woman of the Hour, her directorial debut and most revealing project to date.

At the top, we dive into the movie’s true crime origin (4:00), its examination of gender politics in the 1970s (11:15), and the personal Hollywood experiences Anna folded into this story (19:00). Then, Kendrick reflects on her early years as a child actor: commuting from Portland, Maine into New York City for work (20:50), receiving a Tony nomination at twelve (24:40), and moving to Los Angeles at seventeen (27:00).

On the back-half, Anna unpacks the “dissociative” process of directing a film (30:00), the mentorship she received from actor and collaborator Jake Johnson (39:00), and the dangers of workaholism (45:00). To close, she shares a passage from her memoir Scrappy Little Nobody (54:30) and describes the work she hopes to make in years to come (57:00).

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