Anna Kendrick has opened up about her personal experience of surviving “emotional abuse”.
The 37-year-old actor stars in the forthcoming drama Alice, Darling, as the titular character who is trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship with her boyfriend, Simon (Charlie Carrick).
Speaking to People in a recent interview, Kendrick shared how the film’s script resonated with her in a “personal” way.
“Usually, it’s just I read a good script and I like the people involved, and I make the movie,” she explained. “And it was really surprising timing that we found this script at that moment in my life.”
“I was coming out of a personal experience with emotional abuse and psychological abuse,” she recalled. “I think my rep sent it to me, because he knew what I’d been dealing with and sent it along. Because he was like, ‘This sort of speaks to everything that you’ve been talking to me about.’”
The Pitch Perfect star added: “It kind of helped me normalise and minimise what was happening to me, because I thought, ‘Well, if I was in an abusive relationship, it would look like that.’
“I was in a situation where I loved and trusted this person more than I trusted myself. 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,” she described of her former relationship.
She continued: “And I was in a situation where, at the end, I had the unique experience of finding out that everything I thought was going on was in fact going on. So I had this kind of springboard for feeling and recovery that a lot of people don’t get.”
While Kendrick declined to name her ex-partner, she said that coming to terms with “what really happened” was “the hardest part of my adult life”.
“My body still believes that it was my fault,” she admitted. “So even with this concrete jumping-off point for me, to walk out of that relationship knowing that I wasn’t crazy, it’s incredible the way that recovery has been so challenging.”
She added that this role has “felt incredibly cathartic”.
Directed by Mary Nighy, Alice, Darling will have its world premiere on 11 September at the Toronto International Film Festival.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, you can call the 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline, run by Refuge, on 0808 2000 247, or visit their website here.
