Anna Kendrick Opens Up About Enduring 'Psychological Abuse' in Recent Relationship
She called her upcoming film 'Alice, Darling,' which deals with a similar theme, 'incredibly cathartic.'
Anna Kendrick spoke with People earlier this week about the "incredibly cathartic" making of her upcoming film, Alice, Darling, which premieres this weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The Pitch Perfect actress, 37, revealed that the script, which follows Alice (Kendrick), a woman who is slowly spiraling as a result of the way she's been treated by her emotionally abusive boyfriend, really resonated with her due to her own experiences in a recent relationship.
"I was coming out of a personal experience with emotional abuse and psychological abuse," she told the publication. "I think my rep sent [the script] to me because he knew what I'd been dealing with...Because he was like, 'This sort of speaks to everything that you've been talking to me about.'"
Kendrick explained that most of the movies she'd seen about toxic relationships hadn't really looked like what she was going through, but the Alice, Darling script "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.'"
Kendrick had recently come out of an unspecified relationship where she'd been gaslit about her perception of reality. "...I loved and trusted this person more than I trusted myself," she said. "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." But in the end, she learned that she'd been right all along. "So I had this kind of springboard for feeling and recovery that a lot of people don't get," she added.
Still, recovery hasn't been easy. She described the act of putting the pieces together as the hardest thing she's had to do as an adult, stating, "My body still believes that it was my fault."
But working on Alice, Darling, the most relevant project she says she's worked on so far, helped. "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."
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