Anna Kendrick used a real-life audition experience for a casting scene in her directorial debut Woman of the Hour.

In the new thriller, the Pitch Perfect star plays aspiring actress Cheryl Bradshaw, who was paired up with serial killer Rodney Alcala on a 1978 episode of The Dating Game.

While Kendrick didn’t “inherently” know what life was like for an actress in the 1970s, she gave one of her own uncomfortable casting experiences to her character.

“The casting scene, where the casting directors ask me about doing nudity and make a very specific reference to my chest – that happened to me when I was 19 in an audition room,” she told Metro.co.uk.

The Up in the Air actress acknowledged that the scene might seem a “little heavy-handed” if it wasn’t for the fact it happened to her “more recently than we’d all care to admit, I think”.

“So we got to have a lot of – well, I don’t know if I should call it fun – but there are a bunch of little Easter eggs like that in the film,” she added.

While Kendrick and her screenwriter Ian McDonald wanted to stick to the truth as much as possible, they had plenty of creative freedom with Bradshaw as so little is known about her. Also, because only short clips of the actual episode exist, they decided to replace the real Dating Game host Jim Lange with a fictional version called Ed Burke.

“There were just certain things that we decided to let go of because they just didn’t serve the story. Also, I’m not playing Jackie O and he’s not JFK, so the idea was never perfect historical accuracy,” Kendrick explained. “It felt like that’s the part of the story where we can try to just mostly bring these larger emotional themes to life.”

Woman of the Hour is now streaming on Netflix.

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