Anna Kendrick was asked during an interview on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast to name the worst note she ever got from a director while filming, and she answered by calling out one filmmaker for strategically embarrassing her on set in front of dozens of extras. The director mocked Kendrick’s improv skills, only for said skills to end up being featured in the film’s trailer months later. Kendrick got the last laugh.
“I remember a director once in a room full of 100 extras or something being like, ‘Hey, on this next one just try something. Just make something up. Just improv something,’” Kenrick recalled. “And I did it and then the director called cut and came over and, once again in front of 100 extras, was like, ‘Oof, let’s go back to the script!’”
“It really felt like a very specific power move thing to embarrass me, to gain dominance. It was very icky,” Kendrick added of the situation. “And then the thing that I improved ended up in the trailer. So fuck you!”
Kendrick did not name the director or the film, but her story shocked the “Happy Sad Confused” live audience as they gasped when it was revealed how the filmmaker dissed to her. The crowd then roared with cheers when Kendrick told off the director.
The “Pitch Perfect” star is now a director herself thanks to the release of “Woman of the Hour,” which marks Kendrick’s feature directorial debut. She spoke to Variety about how embarking on her first press tour as a filmmaker was such a strange experience.
“It’s a lot easier for me to talk in extreme detail about certain moments in certain scenes, or about movies that were inspirations than it is to answer the questions that come up the most frequently — ‘Why this project? Why did you want to direct?’” Kendrick said.
“I think there is a bit of an expectation that I speak quite eloquently about the unique experience of being a female director,” she added. “And then you’re going, ‘I’ve done this one time. I probably shouldn’t be, like, representative of those kinds of big questions.’”
Watch Kendrick’s full interview on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast in the video below.