Earlier this year, while attending the Toronto International Film Festival on behalf of her new movie Alice Darling, Anna Kendrick had to channel her inner John McClane and “escape” from an elevator when the car got stuck between floors. Weirdly enough, I was in the same building the day that this happened. I was meant to interview Kendrick about the movie (it really is the best work of her career). And when I arrived, I was told that I had to climb seven flights of stairs, because the elevator had broken. I just didn’t know that Kendrick had done her best Die Hard impression mere hours before I’d showed up.
The Pitch Perfect star retold the story of her death-defying elevator escape – OK, she’s not exactly Tom Cruise rehearsing for the next Mission: Impossible, but this is still impressive for Anna Kendrick, the non-action star. She was a guest on The Kelly Clarkson Show, and recalled:
Yeah, so we got stuck in an elevator. This is the first day of press at the Toronto Film Festival for Alice Darling. A bunch of us got stuck [sic]. And at first the elevator jolts and you all make a little joke about like, ‘Can you imagine if we got trapped in this elevator?’ And then it was like I was in Die Hard!
You might think that she’s making it sound overly dramatic. But it’s really not. In a normal situation, the rescue crew should just be able to pry the stuck doors open. In this case, however, the elevator car was wedged between floors of the building – a very old building in downtown Toronto, mind you – and so the rescuers had to pop the hatch at the top of the elevator car and lift Anna Kendrick and her crew out. She continued to tell Kelly Clarkson:
Even though they call the fire department, you’re like, ‘Oh they’re gonna pry open the doors’ or something. But we were actually stuck between floors. They had to do the thing of getting pulled up through the hatch. It was very exciting. It was like the most action star thing I’ve ever done.
Wanna see what it looks like to see Anna Kendrick in an “action” scene? Of course you do. The actresses posted footage of the incident on her Instagram page when it happened. It looked like this!
Anna Kendrick is exaggerating when she says she hasn’t done action. Check out Mr. Right or The Accountant for that side of her, as well as some of her upcoming movies. We even went ahead and compiled some of the best Anna Kendrick movies that you might have forgotten she has appeared in. It makes us very excited for her transition behind the camera, as she has revealed she is going to direct a feature film next, a fact that earned her kind words from fellow directors. Now let’s get that movie into theaters, so we can see the kind of story that Kendrick wants to tell.