Anna Kendrick may be considered as an actress and singer, with a 2013 hit in "Cups," but when it came to singing on-screen, her debut vocal performance didn't happen until she appeared in 2012's Pitch Perfect, nearly a decade into her acting career.
During a June 2020 interview with Vanity Fair, Kendrick looked back on her performance in the film.
"At the time, I hadn't sung in a film. So I just kind of needed to prove that I could sing," she explained in the video interview.
When it came time for her to show the Pitch Perfect crew what she could do, Kendrick did her best to lighten the mood.
"I actually brought in a cup and was like, 'I can do this dumb thing, like with the cup.' So they put that in the movie," she recalled of a scene in which she was featured on stage singing and making sounds with a set of cups.
"Originally, Beca's audition song in the first movie was 'I'm a Little Tea Pot,' which, I still to this day, I keep meaning to ask Kay Cannon, like, 'What would that have been? How would that have worked?'" she continued.
Hint: It's Not An Overall!
Because there was a last minute change, Kendrick and the film's director found themselves searching the set of Pitch Perfect for much-needed props.
"The director, Jason Moore, and I were like, going around, collecting cups that we would just see on set to see what would make the best sound for that scene. We had this little collection of like a dozen cups to try once we got to that location and could test them out on that stage," she shared.
"Every cast member, we've all talked about how the thing that got us excited about that movie is Kay Cannon's writing," Kendrick told Vanity Fair of her thoughts going into the film. "She wrote for 30 Rock and the script was the kind of thing that you read and you think you know what it's going to be. It's like, 'Okay. It's a competition thing. It's a college thing. We know the beats of this.' And then the script was so funny and dark and weird and really kind of pushed what was okay to say."
Continuing on to the outlet, Kendrick said that after returning to the movie franchise for its sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, several years later, things didn't go as planned.
"All the producers and stuff had this mantra of like, 'Well, we're a well-oiled machine this time because we're older and wiser and we know that we're not going to get into the last-minute changes to all the music and the dancing that we had on the first movie.' And it was so much worse," she admitted. "It was so much more changes. The finale number we learned the weekend before we had to shoot it."
