Anna Kendrick recalls trauma-dumping on her plumber after 7-year abusive relationship: 'I told him everything'

Anna Kendrick didn’t intend to speak publicly about the seven years she spent in an abusive relationship — but at some point, she needed to let the truth out.

During a recent interview, the Woman of the Hour star told The Independent that she only began talking about the chapter of her life while promoting her 2022 film Alice, Darling, which sees a woman pushed to the brink by her psychologically abusive boyfriend. As Kendrick put it, opening up during the press tour was how "the Band-Aid got ripped off.” But even before that point, she struggled to keep those emotions inside.

"I think I’d hit a point of critical mass,” she told the outlet. “I think what was happening at that time was I was being forced into a place of performance and dishonesty in my private life. I just couldn’t spend another second breathing dishonest air.” 

She adds that it got to such an extreme point that she began trauma-dumping on unsuspecting strangers. “It’s a literal true story that, in the aftermath of this really traumatic relationship, my plumber came over and asked how I’d been, and I just told him everything,” she shared. “I physically couldn’t continue performing.”

Lately, the actress has not shied away from addressing that difficult period of her life. She also delved into the relationship for the Oct. 23 episode of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, where she admitted that it was initially "difficult to identify" that she was in an abusive relationship because "it didn't follow the traditional pattern."

She explained, "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."

She added that even the couple's therapist didn't realize what was wrong until the end, adding that her ex was able to flip blame back onto her. Recapping a particularly memorable incident, Kendrick said, "He told me one day I was terrorizing him because I was just crying because I couldn't pretend that things were fine anymore, and I just started crying. And he screamed in my face, 'You're terrorizing me.' But it was truly from the place of a person who believed that they were being terrorized."

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Aside from exploring a similar relationship dynamic in Alice, Darling, Kendrick also signed on to direct Woman of the Hour, which she was already attached to star in. The film, which premiered this month on Netflix, sees a single woman choose a suitor during a taping of a hit 1970s dating show, unaware that he is actually a serial killer. While reflecting on her decision to direct the film in addition to starring in it, Kendrick told Entertainment Weekly that the story intrigued her because of its continued relevance in dating culture. 

"I was thinking about how even very subtle victim blaming is baked into our culture,” she shared. “Even the most well-meaning people will say things like, 'Yeah, you really just got to pay attention to those early red flags,' which is not a nightmare of a thing to say, but man, woof.'"

She added that if there’s anything she wants viewers to take away, it’s the idea that “more often than not, there is nothing you can do, no matter how smart you are, no matter how careful you are, to protect yourself from someone who wishes to harm you."