Anna Kendrick reflects on a long-term, emotionally abusive relationship that she had a hard time ending.
“I’m so ashamed I’m not going,” the actor said with a defeated sigh about 42 minutes into an episode of “The Chair Expert.released on Monday.
“I thought if we broke up…if he left, after all…it would be confirmation that it was because I was impossible. I’m lucky they put up with 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 changed and he became a “stranger who scared me.”
“I was with someone – it was someone I lived with, for all intents and purposes, my husband. We had embryos together, that was my person,’” she shared about 29 minutes into the episode. “And then, about six years later, I remember saying to my brother, when things first started, ‘I’m living with a stranger. Like, I don’t know what’s going on.”
Kendrick said their romance was sparked after his partner admitted he had feelings for a woman 20 years his junior. Kendrick said she found the reveal “very scary and very confusing” but was “madly in love with him” and wanted to “make it work”.
“She said, ‘It’s scary, but let’s talk about it,'” Kendrick recalled telling her ex, noting that having feelings for someone else wasn’t a “dealer” for her.
The ‘Trolls’ star said her partner didn’t want to talk about it at all and wanted to sweep the matter under the carpet completely.
Kendrick said that for the next year he felt there was an “unspoken mandate not to talk about the change” and every time he tried to bring it up, he became “more and more hostile” and did to feel that her concerns were these. Nonsense. She said their dynamic eventually became, “I’m curled up in a ball, you’re yelling at me, I don’t know how I got here.”
“It was a lot easier for me to assume I was crazy or that I was doing something wrong,” Kendrick said.
“I always thought it was so beautiful, calm, peaceful,” Kendrick added. “That I must provoke this.”
On reflection, Kendrick classified the end of his relationship as incredibly unhealthy.
“It was hard for me to admit that this was an abusive relationship,” Kendrick said. “Because he didn’t follow the path of a frog in water.”
Kendrick’s experience with abuse and not immediately acknowledging it is why she was drawn to the lead role in his new film, “Alice, Darling,” which opens Dec. 30.
“I believe my representative sent [the script] for me because he knew what I was dealing with and sent it to me. Because he said, “This speaks to everything you’ve been talking about.” Kendrick explained to the people. in September.
“I felt very distinct about it. Honestly. I’ve seen a lot of movies about abusive or toxic relationships and it didn’t really feel 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, this would be it.’
You can listen to Kendrick’s full interview with “Armchair Expert” above or head over to the podcast website Here.
