Nowadays, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn't heard of Anna Kendrick. But, as the Pitch Perfect 3 star recalled in a recent interview, it wasn't that long ago when she was relatively unknown in Hollywood and couldn't get a designer to lend her even a pair of shoes for a film premiere.
When that happened before the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of 2009's Up in the Air (for which she was later nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar), Anna said she ended up clearing out a sizable chunk of her bank account to buy a new pair of shoes herself.
"I was not famous so nobody wanted to lend me shoes, but I was broke," she said on a recent episode of The Jess Cagle Interview, according to Entertainment Weekly. "I got talked into spending the money I really didn't have on a pair of Louboutins. They were $1,000. I still have them. They're super-sparkly and spangly, but I will never get rid of them because I'm like, 'I spent my rent on you.'"
Don't worry, though — Anna, who went on to land a major fashion campaign with Kate Spade in 2015 and undoubtedly has little trouble getting designers to dress her now, said she wasn't going completely unnoticed during her pre-Pitch Perfect days. "There were girls who just knew me from Twilight: 'Let's go up to her while she's buying underwear and ask her what Taylor Lautner's like!'" joked Anna, who played Jessica Stanley in the fantasy series's first four films. "I would say, 'He's great. Now I feel weird that you know what my underwear looks like.'"
These days, rather than begging designers for clothes, Anna is much more likely to be confidently turning down high-powered Hollywood types' completely off-base wardrobe suggestions. In a recent interview with Harper's Bazaar, she revealed that some "people at the top" tried to pressure the Barden Bellas into wearing "tighter" clothes in the Pitch Perfect 3 finale. "It's funny — whenever we do the wardrobe fittings I feel like we get notes from the top saying they should be tighter and sexier and show more skin," she explained. "And I'm like, that's not why people are coming to see the movie. They definitely aren't showing up because of our sex appeal. It's nice that audiences are interested in seeing a movie of misfits and girls of different shapes and sizes."
