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Anna Kendrick dug deep for her heart-wrenching performance in Alice, Darling, which world premieres Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival.
In the moving drama, directed by Mary Nighy and written by Alanna Francis, the Oscar nominee, 37, plays Alice, a woman stuck in an emotionally abusive relationship to her successful boyfriend, Simon (Charlie Carrick). To her friends, played by Kaniehtiio Horn and Wunmi Mosaku, Alice seems distressingly distant during a birthday trip. As Alice slowly unravels as a result of the mind games Simon has played on her, her friends try to intervene and help.
As Kendrick tells PEOPLE, Alice’s story “resonated” with her for a specific reason.
“I was coming out of a personal experience with emotional abuse and psychological abuse,” she shares, recalling the time she first came across the screenplay. “I think my rep sent it 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.’ “
“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 adds. “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.’ “
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Describing her former relationship, Kendrick shares, “I was in a situation where I loved and trusted this person more than I trusted myself. So when that person is telling you that you have a distorted sense of reality and that you are impossible and that all the stuff that you think is going on is not going on, your life gets really confusing really quickly. And I was in a situation where, at the end, I had the unique experience of finding out that everything I thought was going on was in fact going on. So I had this kind of springboard for feeling and recovery that a lot of people don’t get.”
Kendrick describes later parsing out “what really happened” in her relationship” as “the hardest task of my adult life.” (The actress declined to name her former boyfriend.)
“My body still believes that it was my fault,” she says. “So even with this concrete jumping off point for me, to walk out of that relationship knowing that I wasn’t crazy, it’s incredible the way that recovery has been so challenging.”
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For Kendrick, Alice, Darling marks the first time she’s taken on a project so relevant to her.
“Usually, it’s just I read a good script and I like the people involved, and I make the movie,” she says. “And it was really surprising timing that we found this script at that moment in my life. And in fact, I remember my first Zoom meeting with Mary Nighy, the director, disclosing to her what I was going through. And I even said to her, ‘This all happened very recently. In fact, it happened so recently that if the movie was shooting in a month, I probably shouldn’t do it.’ But it was many, many months away. So I wasn’t in danger of re-traumatizing myself. But yeah, it’s certainly a unique experience.”
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Kendrick acknowledges that given her personal ties to the themes of Alice, Darling, the making of the film “felt incredibly cathartic.”
“But like so many things in life,” she adds, “I think the piece that was most therapeutic was actually building relationships with these collaborators and sharing our personal histories with each other, and then creating this thing together.”
