In a little more than ten years as a prominent movie star, Anna Kendrick has acted in just about everything, including teen romances (Twilight), dramas nominated for Oscars (Up in the Air), musicals (Pitch Perfect), animated films (Trolls), and broad, raunchy comedies (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) (Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates). She hasn’t removed her clothes in front of the camera, though, and she probably won’t.
Kendrick explained in her memoir, Scrappy Little Nobody, that while she doesn’t think onscreen nudity is inherently a bad thing, it’s just not her thing, and she wants to keep a clear separation between who she is in film and who she is in the flesh. “I’ve tried explaining it to people, but it seems you either immediately understand, or you don’t see what the big deal is,” she wrote. “I don’t mind a sex scene. A character can be having a sex scene, but my physical parts always feel like mine. ‘Cause … they are.”
It wasn’t the first time Kendrick had addressed her situation. In a 2010 interview with The Telegraph, Kendrick, then 24, was asked if she’d strip down onscreen to lose her youthful lycan image. “Emphatically no,” she responded. “I will not do that. I have been lucky because I have not been pigeonholed into the teenage movie category. I am not criticizing people who do that but I plan to keep doing what I am doing and hope it keeps going good.”
Although Anna Kendrick appeared to be naked in “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,” she actually used a body double. She even recounted the unusual process of finding her own butt double, a process she said was nothing short of bizarre. Kendrick says that she had to choose a body double from a binder full of pictures of nude women from the neck down (and who, despite only needing to show their backsides for the scene, had also been photographed from the front). “It looked like something out of Silence Of The Lambs,” she wrote in Scrappy Little Nobody.
Kendrick told Playboy that she’s not just uncomfortable with nude scenes, but that she dislikes kissing scenes as well (even fully clothed) because a scripted smooch takes the fun out of making out. “It’s so mechanical; it wasn’t the actor’s idea to kiss me. We just have to look at each other and say, ‘Okay, I guess we are doing this now,'” she explained. “For women, the fact that someone wants to kiss you is the exciting part. If someone’s kissing you when they don’t particularly want to be, it takes the fun out of it. Also, it’s the makeup department’s job to have mints, which is random. Why the makeup department?”
Perhaps Kendrick’s reluctance stems from the awful experience she had the first time she had to smooch on camera. As she recalled to E! News of the scene from 2007’s Rocket Science, in which she starred when she was 19, “I kissed a boy who was 15 or 16 so I felt pretty creepy.” Yep, that’ll do it.
