Anna Kendrick, 40, says watching her friends go to college made her second-guess her decision to pursue acting.
“I was really, really jealous of all my friends that were going to college. Number one, because I felt really insecure about not going to college. I have a whole, you know, complex about it,” Kendrick said on Friday’s episode of “Call Her Daddy.”
Seeing her friends quickly build community through classes and sororities made her feel even more unsure as she tried to find her footing in Los Angeles.
“I was 17 or 18. It’s really hard to make friends in LA because of, like, the way the city is laid out, but especially when you don’t have a fake ID. Even if I did, I looked about 12, so that wasn’t going to work anyway,” Kendrick said. “And I was just like absolutely terrified and really wondering if I was like, making a huge mistake.”
Her perspective began to change when her friends hit sophomore year and had to start figuring out their future paths.
“Even though the thing that I wanted felt like a total pipe dream, and like, ‘What am I doing? This is a disaster. It’s so hard to carve out a space for yourself in this industry,'” Kendrick said.
“But on the other side of it, holy shit, I did not think like, what a blessing to just know what I want. I was like watching all my friends go, ‘Oh my god, I don’t know what I want, what to do,'” she continued.
The “Pitch Perfect” star said her decision not to go to college felt especially difficult because it went against the path her family valued.
“I was like the first person to not go to college. And my dad was a teacher and everything, so it was like very black sheep behavior to not go to college,” Kendrick said.
She added her parents weren’t thrilled with her decision, but accepted that she was going to do what she wanted. At the same time, her parents saw college as something she could revisit if acting didn’t work out.
“I think there was always that sense of like, well, if things maybe don’t work out that first year, it’s not too late to just, you know, so I think that was always like something that they had in mind,” Kendrick said.
It also didn’t help that questions about college kept coming up when she was in her early 20s, before her acting career had fully taken off.
“Like, oh my god, I have to say I didn’t. And at that point, you know, like 21, 22, I didn’t really have much to show for it yet,” Kendrick said.
Kendrick isn’t the only Hollywood celebrity who has spoken about not going to college.
“Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe told E! News in 2013 that he skipped college because he “already knew” what he wanted to do.
“I think a large part of why people go to college is to figure out what they want to do,” he said. “I very much knew what I wanted to do, so I kind of just figured I’d keep carrying on trying to do that.”
In 2024, Julia Roberts told British Vogue that she regrets not going to university.
“It wasn’t in my cards,” Roberts said, adding that her family didn’t have the money and she “had no scholarship potential.”
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