Anna Kendrick Gets Real on Rejection: 'This Guy So Obviously Wasn't Into Me'

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Hindsight is 20/20 for Anna Kendrick.

The 31-year-old actress opens up about an early relationship in an exclusive excerpt from her book, Scrappy Little Nobody, released by Glamour,recalling a time when she had sacrificed herself in pursuit of a 28-year-old musician with no interest in her.


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"The summer I turned 21, I dated a musician named Connor. Well, I thought he was a musician and that we were dating. He thought he was a screenwriter who occasionally played music and that we were ‘hooking up and not labeling things because labels cause drama,'" Kendrick hilariously describes. "He was 28 and something of an introvert. I took this to mean that he was deep and artistic and probably judged me for talking as much as I do. Once we broke up, I realized it just meant that he was kind of boring -- and probably judged me for talking as much as I do."

"Looking back, it's hard for me to understand what I was doing," she writes. "Why on earth would I pursue someone who had no interest in me?... Part of me knew I was only determined to bring him around because he was resisting, but the idea of acknowledging the rejection hurt more than pretending the relationship might be going somewhere."


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According to the Pitch Perfect star, she was like a whole other person from the moment the relationship started. "If I could see tape of us interacting, I doubt I would recognize myself. Who was I trying to make him fall in love with? My strategy was to just be agreeable," she says. "I had this fantasy of a braver parallel-universe version of myself, but around him I became the most sterile, inoffensive version instead."

Kendrick's insecurity created a relationship that was wholly one-sided; the bulk of her relationship with Connor consisted of her staring at her phone until he texted back, hanging out with their group of friends and then going home with him after, and making an effort to cook breakfast for him without any thanks.

It wasn't until the actress, who describes herself as a "spineless doormat" during the relationship, finally asked about Erika, another girl he might be interested in, that things changed.

"A few weeks later Connor broke up with me. I cried. So much. It was hideously embarrassing. What had happened to me? This guy so obviously wasn't into me, we weren't ever really together in the first place, and I was behaving like a messy trophy wife who'd just been told the prenup was ironclad," she recalls.


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Kendrick admits that leaving a few weeks later to shoot an independent film in Indiana helped distract her from the breakup. "I'd held out on cyberstalking for a while (two days) and rewarded myself by looking up Connor and everyone remotely connected to him," she writes, discovering that Connor had actually moved on with Erika.

While the Trolls star continued to dwell on her misery, 10 years later, she's managed to move on… sort of.

"Recently someone who still knows Erika mentioned her to me. I cringed: that b**ch," she says, before admitting that she's trying not to hold grudges.


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