Anna Kendrick has spoken out about how she discovered her ex-boyfriend’s infidelity and contacted the woman with whom he cheated on her.
The 37-year-old actor reflected on how she found the huge “truth” behind her relationship during a recent episode of the Armchair Expert podcast. She noted that when she was “exposed to a year-long texting exchange,” between her unnamed ex and another woman, the alleged affair was “way worse than [she] ever thought”.
Kendrick claimed that when she confronted her ex about it, he denied it, explaining: “This is a year plus in and he is screaming at me: ‘It was passing crush, you’re so insecure, I never saw a relationship with this girl, I even told my best friend I never saw a relationship with this girl.’”
She went on to note that in the alleged text messages, the ex told a woman that he wanted to “blow up [his] life” for her and “ride off into the sunset together”, “after a week of f***ing” her. However, Kendrick claimed that the woman ended up rejecting her ex in the messages.
She also said that her ex continued to deny ever sending these texts.
“I didn’t actually think that [he] could lie to my face with such intensity and conviction,” the Pitch Perfect star added. “When I confronted him on it he said: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Which again was kind of a relief because you go: ‘Oh, you’re pathological right?’”
The singer said that she then contacted the woman via “email” and wrote: “I just think it’s fair that you know, that I know and I don’t put this at your doorstep. You made a mistake but you know you’re 25 and we’ve all done stupid s***.”
Kendrick also told her that even though she doesn’t know if they’d ever “be in a room together”, she’d be “more than willing” to talk. From there, she said that the two of them got a phone call.
“To her eternal credit, she was like: ‘Yes, can I call you?,’” the Noelle star continued. “We talked on the phone for about an hour and she was just like, ‘I’m so embarrassed and I’m so sorry…’ She was like: ‘This is a mistake.’”
She went on to explain how the hour phone call helped her, after her ex constantly denied cheating on her.
“Even though I had seen it in black and white, it was infinitely more valuable to me and it landed finally, in my body, hearing her say it, much of healing is relational,” she said. “It was so magical to me that after all that evidence cataloguing.”
Kendrick emphasised that when she collected all this evidence that her previous boyfriend cheated, he would still tell her that he didn’t “know what she was talking about”. Although she confessed that there were points where she’d believe him, she also revealed that the conversation with the woman ultimately allowed her to trust and focus on herself.
“My body wouldn’t believe that I’d seen the proof, yes,” she said. “And it was her saying it and having compassion that I was like: ‘Oh, this is real.’ I hadn’t eaten in a week. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I had this conversation with this girl and we hung up, and I was like: ‘Oh, I need a plate of nachos.’”
The Up in the Air star continued to explain how she gained closure from this conversation and that it gave her body “whatever it needed”.
“My whole body just went: ‘You can grieve. You’re not crazy. You’re safe. You can grieve. You can eat nachos. And you can have a glass of wine.’” she said. “It was like my whole body got whatever it needed. It at least stopped that total panicked state that I’d kind of been in for a year.”
Over the years, Kendrick has opened up about her previous relationships. During an interview with People in September, she reflected on starring in Alice, Darling and how its script resonated with her, as she was “coming out of a personal experience with emotional abuse and psychological abuse”.
“I was in a situation where 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.”
