Anna Kendrick Had Embryos With Her Toxic Ex
She said he’d “scream” at her until she was “curled in a ball, sobbing.”
Anna Kendrick got vulnerable on a Jan. 9 episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, hosted by Dax Shepard. During their conversation, Kendrick opened up about her personal life — specifically, a relationship she had with a toxic ex-boyfriend, with whom she shared embryos.
“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 told Shepard, per Page Six. “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.'” Apparently, he made a habit of “scream[ing]” at her until she was “curled in a ball, sobbing.”
She didn’t fully recognize how “toxic” their relationship was at first. "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 explained, according to People. "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.’”
Their deep love for each other made things more disorienting. "I was in a situation where I loved and trusted this person more than I trusted myself,” she said. “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.”
That said, Kendrick was reluctant to leave him. “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 bullsh*t,” she said.
Instead, Kendrick sought professional help, going to therapy and attending Alcoholics Anonymous. “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,'” she explained to Shepard.
However, over time, her perspective changed — helping her make the decision to leave her ex behind. “I ended up going down to just one therapist eventually and I’m totally obsessed with her…but what she did teach me to do was look at my own experience and decide what I wanted and start drawing boundaries,” she explained. “And that was really scary and really hard but that is what ended the relationship.”
Kendrick didn’t say who her ex was, but she has a habit of keeping her romantic relationships private. In January 2022, fans learned that Kendrick and comedian Bill Hader had been dating for over a year without anyone knowing. “They are both very private people, and with the [lockdown], it was easy to keep it quiet,” the source told People at the time. “They're both hysterical so they must keep each other laughing all of the time. She's really, really happy.” (BTW, they reportedly broke up in June 2022 after around two years of dating, so this is not the ex in question.)
