Anna Kendrick is getting very real about a past abusive relationship that she was in.
During an interview on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, the 37-year-old actress opened up about her experience in a previous relationship and how the abuse that she went through had seemed to pop up overnight.
She shared that the actually thought that there was something wrong with her or with her ex when the abuse began.
Anna said to Dax and co-host Monica Padman:
“This was somebody I lived with. For all intents and purposes (he was) my husband.”
She went on to drop the bombshell that they did something major together:
“We had embryos together. This was my person.”
Anna recalled that when the abuse started, she told her sibling:
“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 then began to wondered if either of them was starting to have an illness which was bringing about the change:
“That actually gave me a moment of relief. Maybe he has a brain tumor, or maybe I have a brain tumor.’ They we can do something about it. There’s an answer.”
Anna opened up in more detail about the abusive relationship:
“The next year of my life became, ‘No, I didn’t;’ ‘It was nothing;’ ‘I shouldn’t have said anything.’”
She said that her ex just continued to be very hostile towards her despite her trying to work on their relationship, and that each time she tried to talk to him about what was happening between them, it would simply end up with her “curled in a ball, you’re screaming at me, and I don’t know how we got here.
It was so alarming, and it was so much easier for me to assume I was crazy or I was doing something wrong.
I can’t bring up the fact that I’m scared of you, because when I do, you get really scary. It was hard for me to recognize this as an abusive relationship because it didn’t follow (the normal) trajectory. This is unusual that this is six years of very happy, loving relationship and then an overnight shift.”
Anna also revealed that she felt shame about not being able to leave:
“It wasn’t just the, ‘Oh, I’m losing the relationship.’ 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.”
