Pitch Perfect star Anna Kendrick is getting candid about emotionally abusive relationships. While appearing on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, the actress revealed that she endured emotional abuse in a previous relationship that latest for six years.
"This was somebody I lived with," Anna said of her ex.
"For all intents and purposes [he was] my husband. We had embryos together. This was my person," she said of her then-partner.
Although the individual was unnamed, Anna said they dated while she was already working as an actress. She and this partner were together for six years in what she thought was a normal relationship, until she realized there were some serious red flags.
"I remember telling my brother when things had first gone down, 'I’m living with a stranger. I don’t know what’s happening,'" she recalled on the show.
Anna told Dax that the change in their relationship felt so stark that she wondered if maybe one of them had fallen ill.
"That actually gave me a moment of relief," she continued. "'Maybe he has a brain tumor, or maybe I have a brain tumor.' Then we can do something about it. There’s an answer."
But she realized that the answer seemed to be something more obvious. She recalled him visiting her on set one day, where she noticed he was acting “very strange” and “distant.” When she asked him what was going on, he confessed something about another woman but would not elaborate further.
"The next year of my life became, 'No, I didn’t'; 'It was nothing'; 'I shouldn’t have said anything,'" she recalled of his responses when she brought the topic up again. Even though she wanted to “work on” their relationship, her partner became "increasingly hostile" toward her.
She recalled that each time she tried to bring up the incident, it resulted in, "I’m curled in a ball, you’re screaming at me, and I don’t know how we got here."
Anna also revealed that she felt the whole thing was her fault.
"It was so alarming, and it was so much easier for me to assume I was crazy or I was doing something wrong," she said.
She said that her partner never offered to address his behavior, and she felt that bringing it up again made her more unsafe.
"I can’t bring up the fact that I’m scared of you, because when I do, you get really scary," Anna recalled thinking of her partner.
She revealed why she did not immediately leave at the first sign of toxic behavior.
"It was hard for me to recognize this as an abusive relationship because it didn’t follow [the normal] trajectory," she said. "This is unusual that this is six years of very happy, loving relationship and then an overnight shift."
It was over a year before they were able to put the relationship behind them, which Anna blamed herself for, too.
"I have so much shame about not leaving. It wasn't just the, ‘Oh, I’m losing the relationship,’" she explained.
"It was that I believed that if we broke up, or if he left, basically, it was a confirmation that it’s because I’m impossible. … There was an inherent thing of me being so rejectable that this person who loved me very deeply for six years, it suddenly occurred to him how awful I was or something," she said.
