Up in the Air's Anna Kendrick on Getting Hired, Not Fired
High Society (1998)
Something theater fans may know that film buffs haven't realized yet is that you have a theater background -- in fact, you're one of the youngest people ever nominated for a Tony, and it was for your very first role in High Society. What do you remember about winning that part?
My parents had started driving me to New York when I was 10, and it's a six-hour drive there and a six-hour drive back, so after a while, they started sending me and my brother down on Greyhound buses. So I went down on a Greyhound bus to audition for High Society and when they asked me to stay for callbacks, I had to get a hotel room and stay in the city. My parents had to fax a credit card to this hotel room and they told my brother and me not to leave the hotel and to only go out for auditions and then come straight back -- of course, we said we would, and then went straight to Bleecker and MacDougal to have breakfast, because we thought we were the coolest kids in the world. [Laughs] We kept having to stay and stay, so my brother and I were alone in New York City, and then we were on a Greyhound bus back when I found out that I got the job. Everyone was sleeping on the midnight bus, and I was trying not to scream because I was 12 and I was going to be on Broadway.
Was that one of your first auditions?
No, no, no. I started auditioning when I was about 10 and I didn't get my first job until I was 12, and two years [without winning a role] at that age is really hard. I went in for High Society and I sang and read a scene, like I'd done so many other times before, and I remember the casting director commented on my nail polish being like her nail polish. We had that conversation beforehand and I think that helped relax me a lot.
Tell me about those two years prior where you kept going up for roles and not getting it. That must have been frustrating for a kid wanting to break into acting.
Yeah, it's frustrating. Still, I was so young and the dream of being on Broadway seemed so unobtainable and magical that I just had to do whatever I had to do.
Could you appreciate the enormity of landing this big Broadway musical and a Tony nomination at that age, or did that appreciation come with time?
I definitely was incredibly excited then, but I don't think I really understood all that it meant to so many people. I think that's a good thing in a way, and it's nice to look back on it and know that I enjoyed it in the way a 12-year-old enjoys it. I didn't feel some kind of pressure, and I think I would have felt really guilty about it because the Tony award means so much to people -- I would have felt bad about being nominated at 12!
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Comments
She was amazingly hilarious in Camp.
I'm proud to be gay enough to have loved Camp and to be able to sing the entire "Life Upon the Wicked Stage" song she's performing in that first picture after the jump.
She's fancy.
What a lovely woman. She's absolutely brilliant in Up In The Air, which is a terrific film in itself.
Thank you for the best interview of Anna Kendrick for fans anyone has done in years. Way more than just the standard Twilight and Up in the Air questions of other interviews. And, unlike other interviewers, Kyle Buchanan clearly knows Anna Kendrick was an experienced and talented pro before those two movies (although she's great in them, too).
That 1998 picture of little Anna in curls is not from High Society. It's from the "My Favorite Broadway" special that year (later on PBS), when she sang "Life Upon the Wicked Stage" from Showboat, backed by dancers from the then-revival production of Cabaret.
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Without question, Anna is my favorite new artist, and this interview only confirms my appreciation. Talented, beautiful, gracious and smart, it's hard to imagine a more deserving person. A superb interview.
[…] discusses getting the Camp role. A cousin to the director encouraged her to audition for the […]