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George Clooney Said the Perfect Thing to a Nervous Anna Kendrick the First Time They Met

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | September 9, 2014 |

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | September 9, 2014 |


Anna Kendrick was on Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast this week, and I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of that show. I’ve already written this morning about the time Anna Kendrick threw away a pair of diamond earrings she received from a fan (DO NOT SEND SH*T TO ANNA KENDRICK’S HOME). I also loved the story she told about meeting George Clooney for the first time on the set of Up in the Air, the movie which garnered her an Oscar nomination and catapulted her to stardom (interestingly, Kendrick said that she landed both Up in the Air and 50/50 based on her performance in Rocket Science, one of my very favorite movies of all time, and one that “no one saw,” she said, except “filmmakers.”)

After landing the role in Up in the Air, she found it to be a surreal experience, and for a while, thought it was all a dream that she’d eventually wake up from. But Clooney assuaged her nerves.

George [Clooney] was so nice. I didn’t meet him until we were on set together. There was the first thing we shot together, we were doing a sort of-walk-and-talk, and we were waiting to go, and he was like [under his breath], ‘Do you get nervous? I get nervous.’

I was like, ‘Oh My God!’ It was the smallest thing, but it, like, opened up my world … He probably does that for everybody when he can tell they’re like, ‘What am I doing here? I don’t belong here.’ Just a couple of words from [Clooney] and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, he’s a person! I’m a person. WE’RE THE SAME!’

Kendrick went on to say that Clooney was incredibly helpful during the entire shoot. For instance, during one day in particular in which Kendrick couldn’t get out of her own head, Clooney kept throwing Nerf balls at her so she would snap out of it.

“Then there was this day where I’m sitting across from a computer screen. [My character is] firing this older guy for the first time. And George is sitting next to me, and he sat next to me all day because I was stuck there. It was such a complicated, heavy scene, and they were like moving camera equipment and stuff and I was just sitting there, and he was sitting next to me, just like feeling me out. At one point, I was like, ‘Can you run lines with me?’ and he immediately did the scene with me. And I didn’t realize until later that, you know, he’s a fucking movie star. He could’ve just fucked off and, you know, gone to his trailer or called his agent. [He didn’t have to sit with me all day] for a scene he’s not even in, running the other guy’s lines with me.

And that kind of generosity is something I think about all the time. If he can be that generous, everybody should be able to do that.”

And there you go, folks: The sweetest actor in Hollywood on one of the most generous actors in Hollywood.

I also wanted to mention this because I’m terrified that it might have been one of you degenerated involved, but if you put Anna Kendrick on your five freebies list (something we use here to calculate our Pajiba 10) do NOT actually tell her that, especially if she’s with a gentleman friend. This has happened to her. She has been told, while out with her boyfriend, that she was on a guy’s five freebies list. She did not appreciate of the compliment. She’s not actually going to drop everything she’s doing and f**k you because you’re on her list, you goddamn creep.

Source: WTF Podcast