Anna Kendrick Reveals She Created Embryos with Her Toxic Ex Before Relationship Shifted
Mike Marsland/WireImage Anna Kendrick
Anna Kendrick is opening up about surviving a toxic relationship.
Speaking with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman on the podcast Armchair Expert, the Alice, Darling actress, 37, opened up about having made embryos with an unidentified ex, who was "for all intents and purposes, my husband."
"I was with someone — this was somebody I lived with, for all intents and purposes my husband. We had embryos together, this was my person,'" she shared. "And then about six years in, about somewhere around there, I remember telling my brother, when things had first kind of gone down, 'I'm living with a stranger. Like, I don't know what's happening.'"
Explaining that she'd seen a personality shift and her partner later revealed he had feelings for someone else, Kendrick explained she continued to try and work on the relationship through couple's therapy despite the continued behavior.
"It wasn't just the, 'Oh, I'm losing a relationship.' It was that I believed that if we broke up or, you know, if he left basically, it was a confirmation that it's because I'm impossible, I'm lucky that he's even tolerating my b-----t."
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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images Anna Kendrick
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"There was an inherent thing of me being so rejectable that this person who loved me very deeply for six years, it suddenly occurred to him, how awful I was or something," she continued. "The shame, that lingers much longer."
Kendrick recalled how she "dismantled" her life to deal with the tumultuous nature of the relationship in hopes of what it could be if things were fixed.
"I did start going to Al-Anon while all this was going on. I mean, look, I truly dismantled my life, and at first, that was as a reaction to the accusation that I was crazy and I was the one causing the problem," she explained. "So I had a conversation with CAA, my agency and said I need to take time off, I have a mental health problem."
She continued, "I started seeing two therapists a week and I started trying to learn to meditate and I got into Al-Anon and all of these things ended up being very wonderful things for me in the long run, but initially went into them thinking, 'Tell me how to stop being crazy. Tell me how to stop feeling anything.' "
Isa Foltin/Getty Anna Kendrick
In September, Kendrick opened up to PEOPLE about how Alice's story in her film Alice, Darling "resonated" with her for a specific reason.
"I was coming out of a personal experience with emotional abuse and psychological abuse," she shared, recalling the time she first came across the screenplay. "I think my rep sent it to me, because he knew what I'd been dealing with and sent it along. Because he was like, 'This sort of speaks to everything that you've been talking to me about.' "
"It felt really distinct in that I had, frankly, seen a lot of movies about abusive or toxic relationships, and it didn't really look like what was happening to me," she added. "It kind of helped me normalize and minimize what was happening to me, because I thought, 'Well, if I was in an abusive relationship, it would look like that.' "
Describing her former relationship, Kendrick shares, "I was in a situation where I loved and trusted this person more than I trusted myself. So when that person is telling you that you have a distorted sense of reality and that you are impossible and that all the stuff that you think is going on is not going on, your life gets really confusing really quickly. And I was in a situation where, at the end, I had the unique experience of finding out that everything I thought was going on was in fact going on. So I had this kind of springboard for feeling and recovery that a lot of people don't get."
