Anna Kendrick once described how she got out of an abusive relationship that had lasted seven years.
Kendrick spoke a couple of years ago on the Call Her Daddy podcast about finding the signs of abuse in her own relationship 'difficult to identify' because they 'didn't follow the traditional pattern'. The Woman of the Hour director explained that she had been in a seven-year relationship, and the realisation that it wasn't right happened gradually over time.
She said: "I was, like, reading all the articles and going, 'This doesn't look... like, some of it looks like how they're describing it, but not completely.
"It was like an overnight switch... that went on for about a year. So it didn't follow that more traditional, like, it's like a frog in boiling water thing where it started slow."
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Kendrick said she'd been thinking about her relationship with her partner and worrying it was her who was at fault before realising that it was 'his stuff' that was the root cause of the issues, as 'difficult' as she found that.
"It came out of absolutely nowhere, but was built on this foundation of I had so much love and trust for that person, so I thought it had to be me," she explained.
"Like, if one of us is crazy, it must be me. So it was very, very difficult to actually go, 'No, I think this is him. I think this is his stuff,' I turned my life completely upside down trying to fix whatever was wrong with me."
She said that for a long time, their couple's therapist 'bought his stuff kind of hook, line, and sinker', but thinks things shifted after she 'yelled' in one of their therapy sessions and 'something shifted'.
The actor emailed her therapist to apologise for shouting, but he called back and told her he was 'proud' of her for speaking her mind, and Kendrick's relationship with her abusive partner ended shortly afterwards.
She said that in one case, she remembered her ex telling her she was 'terrorising him' since she was crying 'because I couldn't pretend that things were fine anymore', and added she was crying while her ex 'screamed in her face' and said that scream came 'truly from the place of a person who believed that they were being terrorised'.
She told People that her experience helped inform her performance in the film Alice, Darling, which follows a woman stuck in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend. The story of the film 'resonated' with her and that 'the hardest task of her adult life' had been working out what happened in that relationship.
"My body still believes that it was my fault," she said.
Topics: Celebrity, Mental Health, Sex and Relationships, Domestic Abuse
Joe Harker