Anna Kendrick is reflecting on an emotionally abusive long-term relationship she had a lot of difficulty ending.
“I have so much shame about not leaving,” the actor said with a defeated sigh about 42 minutes into an episode of “Armchair Expert” released Monday.
“I believed that if we broke up … if he left, basically … it was a confirmation that it’s because I’m impossible. I’m lucky he’s even tolerating my bullshit,” Kendrick later added.
The “Pitch Perfect” star explained to podcast hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman that she was happily dating an unnamed man for several years before their relationship completely shifted, and he became a “stranger who scared the shit out of me.”
“I was with someone — this was somebody I lived with, for all intents and purposes my husband. We had embryos together, this was my person,’” she shared about 29 minutes into the episode. “And then about six years in, somewhere around there, I remember telling my brother, when things had first kind of gone down, ‘I’m living with a stranger. Like, I don’t know what’s happening.’”
Kendrick said that their romance soured after her partner admitted to her that he had feelings for a woman who was 20 years younger than him. Kendrick said she found the revelation “really scary and really confusing” but she was “madly in love with him” and wanted to “make it work.”
“It was like, ‘This is terrifying, but let’s go talk about this,’” Kendrick recalled telling her ex, noting that him having feelings for someone else was not a “dealbreaker” for her.
The “Trolls” star said her partner did not want to talk about it at all, and wanted to completely sweep the issue under the rug.
Kendrick said that for the next year she felt like there was an unspoken “mandate to not talk about the change,” and whenever she attempted to hash out the problem, he’d become “increasingly hostile” and made her feel like her concerns were nonsense. She said their dynamic eventually became, “‘I’m curled in a ball, you’re screaming at me, I don’t know how we got here.’”
“It was so much easier for me to assume that I was crazy, or doing something wrong,” Kendrick said.
“I’ve just always felt he was so cool, calm, collected,” Kendrick added. “That I must be provoking this.”
Upon reflection, Kendrick classified the tail end of her once-loving relationship as incredibly unhealthy.
“It was hard for me to recognize this as an abusive relationship,” Kendrick said. “Because it didn’t follow the trajectory of a frog in water.”
Kendrick’s experience with abuse, and not immediately recognizing it as such, is why she was drawn to the titular role in her new movie, “Alice, Darling,” which debuted Dec. 30.
“I think my rep sent [the script] 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,’” Kendrick explained to People in September.
“It felt really distinct in that I had, frankly, seen a lot of movies about abusive or toxic relationships, and it didn’t really look like what was happening to me,” she added to People. “It kind of helped me normalize and minimize what was happening to me, because I thought, ‘Well, if I was in an abusive relationship, it would look like that.’”
You can listen to Kendrick’s entire interview with “Armchair Expert” above, or head over to the podcast’s website here.
