Anna Kendrick said she valued the challenge of getting angry for Lauren Miller Rogen’s Babies, having considered how rarely she has got to do that in her career.
“That was more challenging than I was expecting,” said Kendrick at her Zurich Film Festival masterclass, of a scene at a baby shower where she “unleashes on all these women in an unreasonable way”.
“I kept apologising to all the other actresses in the scene; obviously they said ‘that’s the scene, that’s fine’. Anger is always hiding grief or pain; it got easier when I would let myself get upset, then go ‘you have to cover that’.” Kendrick said she would ask Miller Rogen to do “three takes in a row where I’m angry, so that I can just get it out of my body because I’m having such a hard time. Then we can see what happens when I have to put down the anger.
“It was really vulnerable, and I didn’t like it!” said the actress-director. “But Lauren was absolutely right to keep pushing me past the defensiveness that I would come to.”
Babies follows a couple grappling with parenthood who find their lives turned upside down when their friend and her toddler move in after a divorce. Kendrick said another recent role, in Chris Rock’s Misty Green, showed her how rarely she has had the opportunity to play rage.
“Rich [Sommer, her co-star and fiancé in the film] and I were sitting in that scene and Daniel Kaluuya was giving this unbelievable performance where he had to go from zero to 60 in anger,” said Kendrick. “Rich and I were bonding over that we don’t usually play characters like that. That would be challenging and exciting.
“The fact is I’m five foot two on a good day, I’m not usually asked to play that feeling,” said the actress-director. “I hadn’t thought about it until I was in this scene in Misty Green. That would be scary and interesting to do.”
Roadmap
Kendrick’s partner in Babies is played by Seth Rogen, who is Miller Rogen’s real-life husband. Kendrick said she took inspiration from the couple’s relationship for the role.
“They have one of those relationships where they make it look so easy,” said Kendrick. “They genuinely prefer to be around each other than not to be around each other. It’s one of those ‘you and me against the world’ relationships; it’s so lovely, and so it was great to observe them together on set and have my roadmap for this.
“It seems like they really calm each other down, they’re completely one another’s home base. It felt very tender and gentle, and it was easy to try to play what I was seeing on set all the time.”
It is Kendrick’s second time acting with Rogen, with the actress recalling Rogen’s collaborative spirit in her early career role in Jonathan Levine’s 2011 comedy-drama 50/50. “There was something about a scene that wasn’t working, and Seth and the director huddled up with Will [Reiser], the writer. And they said ‘Anna, get in here’. It wasn’t coming from a generous place of ‘we should make her feel included’. It was ‘your opinion is expected’.
“To be given that voice, treated as though my opinions were valuable that early in my career was meaningful to me, and set the bar for how collaborators should treat everyone on set. If you have a good idea, say so.”
Having made her directorial debut in 2023 with Woman Of The Hour, Kendrick said she is “so excited” to get back into the director’s chair with The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo, her adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel for Netflix.
AGC Studios’ Babies has its international premiere at Zurich this evening, having launched at Toronto earlier this month. A24 title Misty Green also started at Toronto and plays Zurich, with New York in between, and heads to BFI London Film Festival next month.
Zurich Film Festival runs until Sunday, October 4.
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