Anna Kendrick, star of the Pitch Perfect and Trolls franchises, tackles victim-blaming head-on in her surprising newest film – and directorial debut – Netflix’s latest hit movie, Woman of the Hour.
The Hollywood star has long been an accomplished performer, nabbing an Oscar nomination at 24 for Up in the Air and a Tony nod at just 12 for her role in the Broadway musical High Society. But audiences have got used to associating her with a certain type of upbeat, peppy role and enjoyed her witty persona online and in interviews.
So Woman of the Hour is a pretty major departure for the 39-year-old, who was a standout supporting player in the Twilight saga, dealing as it does with the surreal, stranger-than-fiction appearance that serial killer Rodney Alcala made on US TV show The Dating Game in 1978.
He was in the middle of his spree of horrific crimes and was later convicted of seven murders – although the real number of his victims could be as high as 130.
Kendrick is talking to me virtually from her kitchen on the eve of Woman of the Hour’s release, which will go on to claim the top spot in the Netflix US film charts, as well as number two globally on the platform with nearly 10 million views after just three days.
It’s an impressive feat, but the star is very aware that this tense, real-life drama is not what people were expecting of her – and knew that it could be a huge career risk.
She laughs when I ask her the simple question ‘why?’ and responds: ‘You’re certainly not the first to ask me that!’
It turns out that first person was a good friend of over 20 years’ standing to whom she sent the script and laid out the scenario.
‘I asked, “Do you think I’m crazy to jump on this kind of moving train, six weeks out? And here’s the story and here’s the budget and here’s the timeline. Do you think I’m setting myself up for failure here?,”’ she recalls.
‘And he got back to me and he was like, “Hey, before we get into any of that, what is this? Why this? Why now?”’
Kendrick shares that his response did make her think about the project again ‘because this person’s known me a long time, and maybe that’s a decent question.’
For her, though, she knew what compelled her do Woman of the Hour was its opening scene, in which we see Alcala interacting with a woman, Sarah (Kelley Jakle), after driving her to a remote spot in Wyoming to photograph her – only to strangle her to death.
Director and actress Kendrick isn’t interested in the graphic violence of this – the camera jumps wide for any onscreen murders – ‘but there is something in that image of two people on a hilltop, trusting each other and having that trust violated that feels like these are really scenes about shame and how much of each other’s shame we have to take on before another person is willing to harm us.’
For her, that’s ‘really fertile ground’ artistically and, she adds with a rueful smile, ‘not unfamiliar territory for me’.
‘Obviously this story is a really extreme story, but that question of, “How did I feel perfectly safe 10 seconds ago, and then how did we get here?” is a question that I’ve had to deal with,’ she explains, the same as many other people and ‘especially women,’ she notes.
This opening scene is not a strict re-telling of a case of one of Alcala’s identified victims, but a distinct possibility of what could have happened to any other woman unlucky enough to cross paths with him; police obtained over 1,000 photos from Alcala’s property following his arrest, eventually releasing some publicly in 2010 in a bid to determine if any of these women or children who posed for him were additional victims.
One of the challenges Kendrick was most aware of during Woman of the Hour was ‘the tricky line to walk’ when it came to depicting the murders and her decision to steer clear of any graphic detail.
‘You also don’t want to keep the viewer comfortable – if we’re going look at this, we don’t get to do it and feel comfortable or kind of titillated. I remember seeing the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and thinking, right, this is how terrible I should feel if there’s a depiction of sexual assault, I am absolutely crawling out of my seat, but that’s how I should feel.’
It’s hard to make a film like Woman of the Hour – or write about it – without using the word ‘victim’. As a society, we’ve become accustomed to looking at these grisly killers and the people who encounter them a certain way.
But this movie strives to remind us that you ‘can kind of do everything right’, as Kendrick says, and still not be safe.
‘You can follow all the articles about watching out for red flags and all the ways we’re meant to protect ourselves, and that might do precisely nothing for us in the end. All the women in the film have really different personalities, and they meet this man in different ways, and they interact with him in different ways,’ she points out.
The film also makes viewers second guess any dated notions society might tell us about women’s ‘risk-taking’ leading to dangerous situations by focusing on The Dating Game episode where Alcala was actually picked by Cheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick, known as ‘Sheryl’ in the film) as the winning bachelor.
An aspiring actress who’s reluctantly appeared to go on the show in order to be ‘seen’, Sheryl initially follows what is expected of her from the wince-inducingly sexist host Ed Burke (Tony Hale) before shrugging off that advice and giving the men vying for a date with her more of an intellectual grilling. And it’s Alcala that manages to shine, even tackling her deliberately challenging question: ‘What are girls for?’
‘You’re watching and you’re excited for Sheryl, because she’s kind of taking her power back, and she’s using her voice,’ says Kendrick. ‘But it’s complicated by the fact that you know that that’s getting her closer and closer to danger.’
With only short clips surviving of the real-life episode, screenwriter Ian McDonald and Kendrick took Sheryl as the figure they could explore the most as so little is known about her. They also swapped out the actual host Jim Lang because they wanted to make Burke ‘a real pig’.
‘There were just certain things that we decided to let go of because they just didn’t serve the story. Also, I’m not playing Jackie O and he’s not JFK, so the idea was never perfect historical accuracy,’ she shares. ‘It felt like that’s the part of the story where we can try to just mostly bring these larger emotional themes to life.’
Although Kendrick admits that ‘imagining the life of an actress in the 1970s isn’t necessarily something I know inherently’ for Sheryl, she was still able to bring in her own uncomfortable struggles in Hollywood to the script.
‘The casting scene, where the casting directors ask me about doing nudity and make a very specific reference to my chest – that happened to me when I was 19 in an audition room.’
Kendrick adds that she knows it might have come across a ‘little heavy handed’ were it not for the fact it happened to her, and ‘more recently than we’d all care to admit, I think’.
‘So we got to have a lot of – well, I don’t know if I should call it fun – but there are a bunch of little Easter eggs like that in the film.’
Kendrick is a confessional interviewee, clearly passionate about the first film she’s directed and not shy about laying her own experiences out.
When I ask about the emotional impact that the film had on her and her leading actor, Daniel Zovatto, she talks about the advantage she had of ‘being able to have access to grief’.
‘I had forgotten this until all the cast had been reminding me that I was frequently crying on set on those days,’ she recalls of the scenes where Alcala is shown preying on the women who he planned to kill.
‘Danny didn’t really have that luxury, and I could sort of physically feel his distress because toward the end of the film, he was really ready to put this down, he didn’t want to do this anymore.’
The opening scene was actually one of the last things shot, and Kendrick suggested to Zovatto that he let go of his portrayal of Alcala slightly in order for his character to seem warmer and more genuine. Not only would it help with explaining the uncanny draw of Alcala, but it was ‘a palpable relief’ for Zovatto too.
‘I’m glad that that part of Danny is on camera because I think it’s important that these kinds of people be depicted as truly endearing, rather than having a noticeably superficial charm, because otherwise you don’t forgive any of these women for opening up to him,’ Kendrick points out.
Woman of the Hour will likely attract true crime aficionados and those viewers who are – as Kendrick put it earlier – ‘titillated’ by the idea of this bizarre real-life story.
And it might not be explicitly stated in the film – ‘there’s no big speech about it’ – but Kendrick maintains that the movie ‘is really designed to force you to look at all the ways that victim blaming is a part of our culture, and it’s sort of calcified into all the language that we use’. That is what she calls her ‘dream’ for those who watch Woman of the Hour to think about.
A big part of that is how different all the women are who encounter Alcala, as they were in real life.
‘It always felt to me like it doesn’t matter if you’re the sweet girl or the tough girl or the smart girl, none of it will guarantee your safety if someone is determined to harm you. And I think there’s a lot of ways that even well-meaning people will say in the aftermath of something devastating, “Well next time, you’ve really got to pay attention to the red flags!”
‘The assertion that we’re not constantly trying to pay attention to the red flags is kind of a denial of reality.’