Why Anna Kendrick Refuses To Do Nude Scenes
To everyone dying to see Anna Kendrick naked in a movie: Sorry, pervs. The acclaimed actress has a no-nudity rule when it comes to her roles. And she's certainly not alone. Many other stars of Kendrick's caliber simply won't bare it all for the box office, either.
For example, Sarah Jessica Parker has never gone au naturel for a flick, in spite of the fact that she played the lead on a little show called Sex and the City for six seasons (and yes, she remained clothed throughout the two spinoff feature films, too). You won't see Julia Roberts in the buff from the comfort of a theater seat, either, which is also pretty remarkable considering her breakout role was playing a prostitute in Pretty Woman.
The one common thread that all of these talented mega-stars share is that it's just downright uncomfortable to have the world oogle your naughty bits. But for now, let's get down in the nitty-gritty as to why Anna Kendrick refused to do nude scenes.
Anna Kendrick's 'physical parts' are none of your business
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."
But that doesn't mean Kendrick refuses scenes that require her to be exposed to her colleagues. In fact, she doesn't have a problem with that at all — to point. One scene Kendrick actually loved filming was a shower scene in 2012's Pitch Perfect, in which Brittany Snow's character barges in upon hearing her singing. She and Snow revealed on Anderson Cooper Live that they weren't totally exposed since they wore pasties; Kendrick joked that the scene wasn't "uncomfortable," quipping, "It was the best day of my life! It was why I did the movie."
No, Anna Kendrick won't be stripping down to strip her wholesome image
It wasn't the first time Kendrick explained her case. In a 2010 interview with The Telegraph, Kendrick, then 24 and fresh off of filming The Twilight Saga, was asked if she'd strip down onscreen as a means of shedding her teenage 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."
Of course, it could also help that Kendrick's raw talent extends beyond her appearance: In 1998, she became the second youngest person to ever be nominated for a Tony Award for High Society. In 2010, she was nominated for an Oscar for playing the extremely type-A, uptight Natalie Keener in 2009's Up In The Air alongside George Clooney.
Anna Kendrick is fine with intimate scenes even though they're awkward
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?"
We're just guessing here, but maybe Kendrick's discomfort has something to do with the decidedly awkward experience she had the first time she had to smooch on screen. 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.
But wait, isn't Anna Kendrick's booty in that one flick?
For her Aubrey Plaza-Zac Efron romp Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates, Kendrick's character appeared naked, but Kendrick herself didn't. In fact, she picked out her own butt double for the raunchy romcom, 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. Despite admittedly feeling like "a creep" during the process, Kendrick selected a tush that she thought matched hers... and was told it actually didn't because the butt was too "square."
Ultimately, the petite powerhouse said of the sexy comedy, "Some of those shots are me and some of them are not me. When you choose a butt double they're like, 'Is there anything you want?' As though they were going to scour the nation for the perfect a** you described and then they showed me three pictures and were like, 'This is the only one that could be you. This is the only one that isn't seven feet tall.'" In any case, she told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show that you only see half of a butt at all in the movie... but she still wanted to be sure that it wasn't half of her own booty.