Anna Kendrick on the empowering nature of writing 'Scrappy Little Nobody'
Anna Kendrick misses the days she was a Scrappy Little Nobody.
But while she’s traded anonymity for the pursuit of her art, the Broadway alumna and Oscar nominee’s still got her mettle (but with a few more medals) as she reveals in Scrappy Little Nobody, a collection of autobiographical essays and arguably her most vulnerable effort to date.
Equal parts lighthearted and introspective, Scrappy Little Nobody chronicles Kendrick's rise to fame without the mechanicalness of a how-to, her struggle to navigate the public's perception of her without the sanitization of media training, and her journey of coming into her own without the trite clichés.
"I've tried to be honest,” she writes in the book, "because honesty makes me feel less alone."
It's also made her feel empowered, as Kendrick notes in a video shared exclusively with Paste BN.
Juxtaposing the process of writing with the process of filmmaking, Kendrick says: "I liked that I was creating something that I had complete control of. You know, what I do is very collaborative and I really enjoy that but you know, you are a team and oftentimes, you are taking direction from a number of different places and a lot of different people have ideas and that is the great thing about it and the hard thing about it. So, it was nice to sit in my house and just be on my computer and create something from scratch … I kept expecting someone to swoop in and tell me what to do or what I was doing wrong or how I could improve it and I was surprised by how many times during this whole process, someone has said ... 'It’s your thing and it’s up to you because it represents you.'"