Smart moves

Anna Kendrick says she loves playing strong women. Photo / Supplied

For some reason, Anna Kendrick keeps on being cast as a meanie. But it's working out for her, whether it's been her role of the catty Jessica, human friend of Bella in the Twilight movies or George Clooney's sidekick in the acclaimed Up in the Air.

The latter performance has her lined up as a probable Oscar nominee. She's already topped a recent New York Times list of breakout performers and she's in the running for best supporting actress at the Golden Globes, as is her co-star Vera Farmiga. Clooney received a nod for best actor in a drama, while Up in the Air's director Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You for Smoking) scored nods for best director and best screenplay. Up in the Air was also nominated for best dramatic film, making it the most gonged film overall.

"Certainly this is the movie that says, 'Hello world, meet Anna Kendrick'," says Reitman. "When I first saw Anna in Rocket Science, I thought she was one of the most unique voices of her generation. She reminded me of the many women I fell in love with, including my wife, who were always too smart for the people around them. There's a joy in their personal frustration in that no one understands how smart they are," he chuckles.

In a film that cleverly captures the recent financial climate, Kendrick plays Natalie, an ambitious efficiency expert at a company that specialises in sending out people to do the dirty work when retrenchments need to be made. She has proposed a cheaper way of firing people, remotely, via a television screen, and her boss (Jason Bateman) likes it. When she's sent on a field trip to be shown how it's usually done, face-to-face, by seasoned frequent flyer Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), she displays how icy she can be.

"It's easy for Natalie to think about other people as statistics and not think about the damage that's she's really doing," Kendrick says. "She's a control freak and now for the first time in her life she's a mess. She'd managed to get things to go her way for the majority of her life, but when she meets Ryan Bingham things start to unravel."

Kendrick says that if she hadn't found a way to deal with her own vulnerability through acting, she could have been a lot more like Natalie, as she puts it, "a cold bitch".

She likes to play it tough. "I love playing smart women and I love playing strong women, because in real life I can be really timid. The scene where I yell at George on the pier, I couldn't wait to film it because of feeling that powerful, and feeling that I'm finally saying what's on my mind. It's a feeling that I don't often experience in real life because I avoid confrontation."

She welcomed the role as her most adult to date. "It's a tricky thing trying to transition from high school teen to leading woman, because they seem to be the only categories that females are allowed to play in," she says. "I really can't tell you how exciting it is to have a role like this, where it has nothing to do with the fact that she's female and it has nothing to do with romance or sex. It's such a blessing and hopefully a good transition."

A petite dynamo whose intelligence and skill recalls a young Natalie Portman, Kendrick began treading the boards in the theatre after she found herself an agent at the age of 10.

The native of Maine remains the second youngest actor to receive a Tony nomination, for High Society on Broadway. Looking younger than her years, she can easily get down with the supposedly teenage cast of Twilight. "I'm one of the oldest, the average age is 22," she says, in her fast-talking way. As Bella's human buddy, Jessica, she comes off as a little insecure in the series.

"Jessica's meaner in the books and when I auditioned I thought, 'Shouldn't the mean girl at school be a little taller and a little blonder and look a little meaner?' The only way that I could understand to have someone like me play her, is to be a little desperate and needy and trying to be the alpha female at school, but not really succeeding and coming off like she's trying too hard."

Today showing a little cleavage in a V-necked top, Kendrick is cute but understated in her dress sense. She admits to being far from a fashion victim and to being a jeans and T-shirt kind of girl. "Someone asked me recently what my 'must-have' for the season was and I went, 'my must-have for the season? I don't even know what that means!' So I said that since I've been wearing the same pair of black Converse sneakers for years and years and years, well this season I bought a red pair, so I'm really going crazy," she giggles at the memory.

Clearly as bright as her character in Up in the Air, Kendrick says she did well at school, though wasn't at the top of her class.

"I always thought I'd go to college and it's really strange to me that I didn't. I just wasn't excited about it."

She would have studied theatre but an illustrious career in television beckoned - and she moved to Los Angeles.

"The pilot that I'd done for a show called The Mayor got picked up for mid-season, though it was cancelled before it aired, thank God. But it brought me to LA, and before I knew it I was sort of living there - and cut to right now. I don't know how it happens."

Many a young starlet has lived to tell the tale of being burnt-out in Tinseltown, of course, but bigger things were waiting for Miss Anna. Now as she contemplates her impending stardom she has to learn to go with the flow.

She looks at her Twilight co-stars, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, and wonders how they handle it.

"I like things a certain way and I love my privacy and I love being in control and I love organisation," she admits, "their lives must be chaos. The fact that they've still got heads on their shoulders amazes me."

She is, however, warming to the fashion aspect of fame. "I'm trying to learn about designer clothes. With the dress I was wearing at Up in the Air's premiere I felt like I was Ginger Rogers. It felt amazing. It was pink and had crystals on it and was so girly. I felt like I was in the Gay Divorcee; I felt like I was going to break out into song! So I completely appreciate why people love them and they make me feel really beautiful."

Kendrick says she loves the Harry Potter stories and hadn't read the Twilight books until being cast in the first movie. "Now I've read them all," she admits. She notes there are some advantages of playing a human character in the series.

"We get a little more liberty to stray from the books; people tend not to throw fits if you makes changes to the human world. They just don't really care," she sighs, "because they are so attached to the myth and the supernatural part. So in Eclipse I'm inexplicably at the top of my class and I make the graduation speech. It makes absolutely no sense to me that Jessica would be at the top of her class, but it was a fun scene to shoot."

Lowdown

Who: Anna Kendrick, rising star
What: New Moon and Up in the Air
Where and when: Up in the Air opens at cinemas on January 14.