I used to be pretty ambivalent about Anna Kendrick – in my mind, she wasn’t the worst and she wasn’t the best. She was talented, not a famewhore, but not really that interesting. But over the past year or so, she’s really grown on me. She’s smarter than the average starlet, she’s sassy and witty, and she’s right up there with Emma Stone as one of the “great hopes” for this 20-something generation of actresses. Kendrick covers the February issue of Fashion Magazine (Canada) to promote Into the Woods, where she plays Cinderella to Chris Pine’s Prince Charming. In the interview, she talks about real-life Charmings, being the child of divorce, and how she views the red carpet hustle:

Anna on dating someone like Chris Pine’s Prince Charming: “Oh no. Never. I’ve never really gone for the razzle-dazzle types, no quarterbacks, no flashy guys and no Prince Charmings. Chris Pine’s version of Prince Charming is so funny, and so on-point, and very much all style and no substance. A [date] once picked me up in a Mustang and he was leaning on the hood of it. He waiting for me and I was inside my apartment, looking out the window, thinking ‘Oh, this is going to go terribly.’ The wrong kind of guy to fall in love with is the guy who will let go of the steering wheel as a joke. A guy who finds it amusing to make you uncomfortable, which is more common that you’d think, is someone you want to avoid.”

Her parents’ divorce: “They taught me that staying together for the kids is the wrong approach. It perpetuates this warped idea of what a healthy relationship looks like.”

The best Valentine’s Day of her life: “When I was in my early twenties, I was in L.A. and I had one of those big kind of “Anti Valentine’s Day” dinners with all my single friends which is just a classic move. That went terribly wrong. We tried but none of us could cook—to make pasta with sauce—but it got all sticky and we just had to use like a fork to cut it up and like the chicken was so dry that people couldn’t eat. Cookies got burned too. We ended up ordering pizza and laughing about it.”

Her most awkward fan encounter: “I had a guy come up to me in a bar and I was trying to play darts with my friends but he was trying to talk to me during the game. I was really nervous that I was going to like hit [him] in the face with a dart. I didn’t. It would be one hell of a headline.”

Her secret matchmaking skills: “If it wasn’t for the weirdos, I’ve have no career. There were these two fans of mine that sent me this thing for my birthday—through my publicist. It was a letter about how they met on a fan forum and they like lived in different states but they met up and – sort of weirdly got together. Two weirdos found each other because they liked what ever weirdo vibes I was giving off! That was so sweet, it almost made me cry. That said, I’m really grateful to all the weirdos out there but I think it’s better for my personal sanity not to read my own fan fiction.”

Her red carpet strategy: “Recently I’ve decided that there’s no point in getting dressed up if I’m not having fun. I’ve looked at enough red carpets right now and realized that everyone might think that Taylor Schilling looked better than Lena Dunham at the Emmys… but I thought Lena rocked that red carpet more than anybody else. What the point in fashion if you’re not having a good time?”

[From Fashion Magazine]

A few points – Anna might be having a good time with her style, but no one is really paying attention to it. She barely makes an impact on red carpets. Maybe that’s a good thing – she’s not a Fashion Girl. She’s actually a real, working actress. And I’m totally with her about avoiding guys who think it’s funny to make a girl feel uncomfortable. I wasted too much time on those d-bags when I was younger. The jerks, the mean guys, the emotionally cruel guys. Ugh. I’m also with her on what she learned from her parents’ divorce – right on, girl.

Photos courtesy of Max Abadian/Fashion Magazine.