Anna Kendrick made her directorial debut with the 1970s-set true crime film, ‘Woman of the Hour,’ streaming on Netflix now
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Anna Kendrick on Oct. 10, 2024
Anna Kendrick drew on some real-life experiences while directing her first feature film.
While recently promoting her new Netflix movie Woman of the Hour on SiriusXM’s Crime Junkie AF podcast with host Ashley Flowers, Kendrick, 39, revealed she had one of her actors try saying a line a casting director told her when she was 19 years old.
“While we were shooting it, I was like, ‘Hey, will you guys do this? Will you say these couple lines with me? I’m probably gonna cut it, but I don’t know. It might be interesting,’ ” she said of the actors in the scene.
“They ask me if I’m willing to do nudity, and then this guy makes a very specific and weird remark about my body and that happened to me verbatim when I was 19. Verbatim. In an audition. Yeah. Crazy. Absolutely crazy,” she recalled.
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Anna Kendrick and director of photography Zach Kuperstein on set of Woman of the Hour
While Kendrick did not specify which line featured the comment, the scene she referred to in Woman of the Hour meets Kendrick’s character as she tells two casting directors during an audition that filming nude scenes “is just not for me.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re fine,” one of the casting directors responds in the film.
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Woman of the Hour is inspired by the story of Cheryl Bradshaw and her encounter with Rodney Alcala, a real-life serial killer in the 1970s. In the film, Kendrick’s character Cheryl is cast on an episode of The Dating Game and unwittingly meets Alcala, who’s been selected as an ordinary contestant during the middle of his “yearlong murder spree,” as an official synopsis for the film reads.
Related: Anna Kendrick Recalls Her 7-Year Abusive Relationship and How She Got Out of It: ‘I Just Started Crying’
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Tony Hale and Anna Kendrick in Woman of the Hour
Kendrick noted that she “really had fun making a period piece and playing up the kind of seventies of it all.”
“But also, some of this stuff happened not that long ago, you know,” Kendrick pointed out. “Some of the little, like juicy, little tidbits where you think, ‘Well, no one would say that now,’ and you know, 19 was not recent for me, but yeah. It was not like relegated to the 1970s.”
Woman of the Hour, which also stars Tony Hale, Daniel Zovatto, Nicolette Robinson, Pete Holmes, Autumn Best, Kathryn Gallagher and Kelley Jakle, is streaming on Netflix now.
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