After leaving a toxic ex, everyone strives to find ways to heal. Anna Kendrick does it through her films — and in heartbreakingly poignant form. Her latest foray into understanding her own trauma comes in her directorial debut, the thriller Woman of the Hour (premiering Oct. 18 on Netflix). The film is based on the true story of 1970s serial killer Rodney Alcala, a photographer who spent years assaulting young girls, boys, and women, with impunity. Kendrick, who also stars, plays Sheryl, an aspiring actor who is cast opposite Alcala on an episode of the TV game show The Dating Game. Her character is based on a real person named Cheryl Bradshaw, who won a date with Alcala — a featured bachelor on the show even though he'd already briefly served time in prison for sexually assaulting children.
“There was something in the script that felt really personal to me,” Kendrick tells me in a Zoom interview from her Los Angeles home in late September.
Kendrick says she's lately been drawn to dark stories centered around men who are “very unwell,” and the repercussions of their actions on everyone around them. She especially relates to the feelings of shame victims of abuse experience — something she aims to compare, and even correct, through her character.
Kendrick's version of Sheryl struggles to navigate the sexism of 1970s Hollywood casting directors, but ditches her all-too-agreeable persona once she appears on The Dating Gameleaning into her authentic self with intelligence and Kendrick's trademark fast-talking humor. The film seamlessly balances comedy and suspense through Sheryl, who navigates the world by trying to please everyone in ways that are at times laughingly ridiculous or painfully familiar.
The last time I interviewed Kendrick, it was for her film Alice Darlingabout a woman ending an emotionally abusive relationship. She spoke candidly about an ex who had shattered her self-esteem, gasped her into believing the abuse wasn't real, and made her question reality. She says she received the scripts for Alice Darling and Woman of the Hour around the same time, soon after the breakup.
“In the aftermath of this traumatic situation, there was something in both of those [screenplays] that felt really close to me and important,” says Kendrick. She adds that she connected to the sense of feeling very secure and warm one second, then earth-shatteringly unsafe the next.
Still, Woman of the Hour aims to tell more than one woman's story. Kendrick says she's interested in the ways people try to survive dangerous individuals and systems, and says screenwriter Ian McDonald's script explores “the risk of annihilation we expose ourselves to through intimacy.” The film shines a spotlight on the misogyny that permeates every part of our culture, enabling men like Alcala to kill women for years without consequence. For so many women, it speaks to an ever-present threat, a looming question Kendrick describes as: “What's actually happening here?”
“I felt like the question in the air for a lot of Sheryl's story is 'Hang on, do you see me as human or something else?''” says Kendrick, adding that the scenes where there was violence or the threat of violence didn't 't feel foreign to her. “It's this nameless, amorphous threat that's in the room all the time — but you can't fight it if you can't even really find it.”
KENDRICK WAS ORIGINALLY slated to star in and produce Woman of the Hourbut she threw her hat in the ring to direct when a scheduling conflict led the original director to drop out just before filming. Kendrick explains directing was something she'd subconsciously wanted to do, but hadn't felt brave enough to acknowledge, even to herself, until this film came along. In fact, she spoke with a friend to ask him about directing the movie, and he pointed out that it seemed like something she wanted to do but was resisting. Kendrick says the project's expedited timeline helped her “push [herself] off that cliff.”
A true crime fan, she went deep into research about Alcala's atrocities, keying in on specific details she felt would help her tap into the sorrow and terror in the movie. “He kept trophies, usually jewelry,” she tells me. “The mental image of him, in the aftermath of violating and brutally killing a person, taking the time to remove a delicate piece of jewelry, haunts me. He preserved them for years. He treated an earring with more respect than a human being.”
Kendrick thought about one of Alcala's teenage victims who personalized her tennis shoes with the names of her friends, and how the shoes helped identify her remains. She incorporated some of these details into the film, and used other, more gruesome facts to guide her actors' performances. The fictional character Laura, who tries to warn authorities about Alcala multiple times but is ignored, is meant to express all of the grief and frustration of the real-life people who tried to report Alcala. Before a pivotal scene, Kendrick told the actor who plays Laura, Nicolette Robinson, how one of Alcala's victims kept a hammer in her bedside table for protection and Alcala used it against her.
“Anna's an actress first, and so she understands the process,” says Daniel Zovatto, who plays Alcala. He says that from the beginning, Kendrick was adamant that the story center the interactions between Alcala and his victims, rather than just being about his side of the story. Alcala would often connect to his victims, some as young as seven, by offering them rides home or convincing them that he was a fashion photographer.
Kendrick, far right, directing on set with Daniel Zovatto (far left) and Kathryn Gallagher.
Leah Gallo/Netflix
Autumn Best plays teenage runaway Amy, who is based on one of Alcala's victims, named Monique Hoyt. Best remembers Kendrick supporting her through some of the very difficult, tragic scenes she had to film. “Anna was there the whole time and was very emotional for all of that,” she remembers. “It's really nice to feel like I wasn't floating in this emotional void and she was experiencing it with me.”
THE CAST AND CREW'S dedication to crafting a victim-centered narrative brought Kendrick to tears during our talk. She laughs at herself while crying, saying that after filming, one of the actors said, “It's really nice when you'd finish a take and Anna would be crushed,” and the other actors agreed.
“When I would be seeing the scene happen, that mixture of knowing that these atrocities happen and at the same time being among people who had so much reverence for the material and what we were trying to do, it did frequently make me very emotional, ” says Kendrick.
Kendrick says she was in “a dissociative state” while filming the movie, not only because she was working on “adrenaline and instinct” but also because midway through filming, her father died. “I had to put that in a lockbox until after the movie, to just function,” she says.
But one trauma she couldn't lock away was the abuse in her past. While her personal story helped her weave the undercurrent of fear and misogyny women face daily into the film — starting scenes from the victim's perspective rather than Alcala's, or creating suspense by having his character just out of frame while Sheryl walks through the parking lot — there were moments it almost held her back: She occasionally found herself drawn to Alcala's point of view, or caught herself beginning a scene by having a camera follow him versus his next victim.
“There was this pull toward, 'What's going on inside of Rodney's head? Can we get in there? Is that interesting?'” says Kendrick. “It's such a fucking mirror of my own experience, [thinking]'What the hell was going on with him? Maybe if I could just figure out how his brain worked. I'd find resolution.' I found that temptation would creep in, and I'd have to notice that pattern and push it away.”
Kendrick says that excavating her own experiences for the film forced her to be vulnerable in a whole new way. “In spite of writing a book [about my life]this feels like the most revealing thing I've ever done,” says Kendrick, referencing her 2016 collection of personal essays, Scrappy Little Nobody. “I don't want to dishonor what's at the heart of the movie through sound bites, so I'm trying to be perhaps overly authentic, perhaps more than I should.”
It's why she says she doesn't think she can bear to read reviews of the film: “Every frame of the movie is almost my own terror.”
WOMAN OF THE HOUR certainly has its fair share of terror, but McDonald credits Kendrick's background in comedy for helping the movie not feel too dark. When the film goes behind the scenes of The Dating GameKendrick and McDonald use the shift as a chance to lighten the mood and let the audience breathe. The sequence is witty and clever — Sheryl decides to forgo the boring, scripted questions and shy, nice-girl persona and instead starts openly mocking the other contestants while building a relationship with Alcala — and almost makes you forget you're watching a thriller. Then, it pivots sharply back to that atmosphere of fear: While Sheryl is getting her face touched up during a break, the makeup artist comments that for years she's seen people flirting on the show but for the female contestants, the “question beneath the question remains the same: Which one of you will hurt me?”
“The way she just throws that off like it's nothing is the reason why the line works,” says Kendrick. “Like it's the most obvious thing in the world, like, 'Oh the coffee machine's over there.'”
McDonald was on set that day and noticed how Kendrick encouraged actors to ad-lib jokes into the scene. “Anna captured the essence of the script as I had imagined it, but also peppered in all these little things that are purely her,” says McDonald. “She was totally in her element.
“I didn't want it to be a movie about a serial killer,” McDonald continues. “I wanted it to be a movie about the spectrum of misogyny,” from the casual to the sinister. He points out that people won't acknowledge their own complicity in a society where someone like Rodney Alcala roamed free for years. It's why he incorporated characters into the script like a man on the game show who made sexist remarks, and a predatory man who lives down the hall from Sheryl's character. “It's very easy to be like, 'Well, I never kidnapped and killed someone, so I'm OK,'” McDonald says, “but hopefully [the film] challenges viewers to look at themselves and wonder how they could do better.”
Kendrick and I talked about the violence of misogyny as well, how it often prompts women to be pleasers, or to fawn over someone in order to avoid conflict, behaviors she and McDonald folded into their depiction of Sheryl. “All women develop these survival strategies, right? Fawning is chief among them, and it can frequently put us closer to danger,” says Kendrick. She says sometimes people recommend that women assert themselves in charged situations, but that only works if the person you're speaking to is also healthy, which she calls a fairy tale.
It's a note she gave to McDonald during a rewrite about the subtle ways women protect themselves when they feel threatened. There were moments in the script when Alcala's victims would say something to the effect of, “You're making me uncomfortable right now.” Kendrick says she explained to McDonald that it would be unrealistic or unsafe for women to say that.
“How would he know the secret language” women use to navigate danger, she asks. “We're trying our hardest to keep it a fucking secret.”
With Woman of the Hour Kendrick is unleashing that secret to the world, while encouraging women to trust their instincts. As our conversation wraps up, she recalls listening to the feedback from a focus group that had seen the film. Someone said, “All women should see this,” and a man followed up with, “I think all men should see this.”
“I was over the moon,” says Kendrick. “Obviously, I hope that women feel reflected in the movie. And I do have this perhaps fantastical wish that if men saw the movie, they'd get a little extra insight into our day-to-day experience.”
