We all know that Anna Kendrick has starred in a bunch of hit movies.
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Most recently, she played Cheryl Bradshaw in Netflix’s Woman of the Hour, which was also her directorial debut.
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But Anna’s breakout role came back in 2008, when she starred in Twilight.
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Anna appeared in four of the five Twilight films: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn — Part 1.
Anna played Jessica Stanley, AKA the best friend of protagonist Bella Swan, famously played by Kristen Stewart.
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It was such a moment at the time, and now, Anna has given us all a little more context behind the viral tweet.
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Appearing on the Call Her Daddy podcast last week, Anna recalled to host Alex Cooper, “A while ago, I had done a silly funny tweet where I just said, ‘Holy shit. I just remembered I was in Twilight.’ And people were like, ‘You didn’t forget that you were in Twilight.’”
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“The answer is truly yes and no. Obviously I didn’t forget the experience of making the movies… But those movies, especially at the time, took on such a life of their own, and they were such — for better or for worse — a touchstone,” she said.
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“I would find myself in business conversations talking about, ‘Oh, yeah. I’ve heard that there’s a book series that just got optioned that we maybe wanna try and make it the next Twilight.’ And then I would be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m in that. I’m, oh my God,’” she said.
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Anna went on to explain that she felt lucky to avoid the masses of negative attention that leading actors Robert Pattinson and Kristen faced when Twilight was released.
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In addition to masses of paparazzi, Kristen and Robert faced backlash from several fans of the OG Twilight book series, which the films were adapted from. A couple of years ago, Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke reflected on the frenzy surrounding Kristen and Rob, saying, “That was a tough situation for [both of them] to be in.”
Anna said on Call Her Daddy, “I was really lucky to not be dealing with the eye of the storm. You know? I think that a lot of the folks that were in the movie, even in the later movies, as long as you were a supernatural character, if you had one line, you couldn’t leave your hotel room.”
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“People were crazy, and people were criticizing, ‘Oh, but she has green eyes in the book’, or whatever. And I just didn’t have to deal with any of that,” she continued.
“So it almost feels like I didn’t really have the gauntlet that… most of the other people did. I just had to show up and say dumb funny shit,” she said. “It was awesome.”