Anna Kendrick Redirected Her Funds From ‘Woman of the Hour’ to Charity

Anna Kendrick made her feature directorial debut with Women of the Hour, the film based on the true story of serial killer Rodney Alcala. She also plays the lead role in the film as a character that draws from Cheryl Bradshaw, who narrowly escaped Alcala’s violence after encountering him on the series The Dating Game in the 1970s. Before money started flowing in after the film was purchased by Netflix, Kendrick made a conscious choice to redirect her portion of the proceeds to abuse charities and organizations.

“I sort of asked myself the question, ‘Do you feel gross about this?'” Kendrick shared on Sirius XM’s Crime Junkie AF podcast. “And I did.” The realization came late in the process. The film was nearing completion and was scheduled to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023. “It wasn’t until the week before TIFF that I thought, ‘Oh, the movie is going to make money,'” she said. “I went from being like, ‘Let me know when the movie happens,’ to being like, ‘Oh God, I am responsible for this.’ … We just barely made the deadline to get into TIFF, and then it was like, ‘Oh, there’s money gonna be exchanging hands.'”

Kendrick donated her salary to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) and the National Center for Victims of Violent Crime. “It’s still a complicated area but that felt like the least that I should do,” she said, adding: “Believe me, this was never a money-making venture for me, because all the resources went to actually making the movie.”
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Woman of the Hour marked a particularly significant evolution in Kendrick’s relationship with true crime as a genre. “I guess maybe I would consider myself to have been a more casual consumer of true crime. And then when some things went down in a long-term relationship that I was in I really got kind of obsessed,” she said. “It really changed how I consumed true crime. But at any rate, the subject matter of the movie is really gripping but I also hoped to be bringing in some of that emotional DNA to the entire movie.”

Earlier this month, Kendrick told Rolling Stone: “There was this pull toward, ‘What’s going on inside of Rodney’s head? Can we get in there? Is that interesting?’” says Kendrick. “It’s such a fucking mirror of my own experience, [thinking], ‘What the hell was going on with him? Maybe if I could just figure out how his brain worked. I’d find resolution.’ I found that temptation would creep in, and I’d have to notice that pattern and push it away.”