Anna Kendrick Recalls Her 7-Year Abusive Relationship and How She Got Out of It: ‘I Just Started Crying’

Anna Kendrick is opening up about getting out of a seven-year abusive relationship.

On the Wednesday, Oct. 23 episode of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, Kendrick, 39 — who didn’t name the ex she was referring to — admitted she found it “difficult to identify” that she was in an abusive relationship at first because “it didn’t follow the traditional pattern.”

“I was, like, reading all the articles and going, ‘This doesn’t look… like, some of it looks like how they’re describing it, but not completely,” she recalled, confirming that “the relationship was seven years.” 

“It was like an overnight switch… that went on for about a year. So it didn’t follow that more traditional, like, it’s like a frog in boiling water thing where it started slow,” the Twilight actress told Cooper, stating the breakup happened shortly before she started filming her 2022 film Alice, Darling, which is a movie about emotional abuse.

“It came out of absolutely nowhere, but was built on this foundation of I had so much love and trust for that person, so I thought it had to be me,” Kendrick said of thinking she was the problem.

“Like, if one of us is crazy, it must be me. So it was very, very difficult to actually go, ‘No, I think this is him. I think this is his stuff,’ ” she continued. “I turned my life completely upside down trying to fix whatever was wrong with me.” 

The star claimed their couples therapist “just bought his stuff kind of hook, line, and sinker” for “a long period of time.”

“I’ve had several sessions with him in the last several years where he’s apologized to me because I think he realized what was going on, like, right toward the end,” Kendrick explained, before sharing how “something shifted” after she “yelled” in one therapy session.

Kendrick said she emailed her therapist to apologize, but he called and told her he was actually “so proud” of her for speaking out. “Things ended pretty quickly after that,” Kendrick admitted. 

The Trolls actress told Cooper of one incident with her ex, “He told me one day I was terrorizing him because I was just crying because I couldn’t pretend that things were fine anymore, and I just started crying. And he screamed in my face, ‘You’re terrorizing me.’ But it was truly from the place of a person who believed that they were being terrorized.”

Kendrick previously spoke to PEOPLE about being in an abusive relationship at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival world premiere of Alice, Darling, which followed a woman stuck in an emotionally abusive relationship to her successful boyfriend, Simon (Charlie Carrick).

In her interview with Cooper, Kendrick said she actually “didn’t tell anybody” about making a movie about emotional abuse at the time, because it was so soon after her relationship ended.

“I had just gotten out of a relationship that was extremely similar to the movie,” she said on the podcast. “And I didn’t want anybody to tell me to not do it.”