Anna Kendrick is super outspoken about her abusive relationship and her path to healing. While she hasn’t named her ex-boyfriend, many fans are speculating that it could be Ben Richardson, who she worked with on the movie Drinking Buddies.
“I had just gotten out of a relationship that was extremely similar to the movie,” the actress shared about her 2022 movie Alice, Darling during an episode of Call Her Daddy on October 22, 2024. She talked about how her therapist “bought” his stories in couples therapy sessions. “I always felt like I was trying to stay so calm in couples therapy because I was like, f—, in these sessions, he’s so able to kind of stay calm in a way that he does not do when we’re outside of therapy,” the actress recalled.
She also said at certain times, her ex would accuse her of terrorizing him. “I was just crying, because I couldn’t pretend that things were fine anymore,” she recalled. “I just started crying and he screamed in my face, ‘You’re terrorizing me.’ But it was truly from the place of a person who believed that they were being terrorized.”
Related: Anna Kendrick’s Abusive Ex Once Accused Her of ‘Terrorizing’ Him—Take a Look Back at All Her Relationships
Fans on social media speculated that the person who Anna Kendrick was referring to was cinematographer Ben Richardson. “Ben Richardson is a potato,” one user wrote on Call Her Daddy’s TikTok. The two dated from 2014 to 2020 and fans were connecting the dots between what Anna has said about her abusive relationship with her six-year-long relationship.
Why did Anna Kendrick & Ben Richardson break up?
Both Anna and Ben were very private during the duration of their relationship. They never explained why they broke up, but Entertainment Tonight reported that they were last photographed together in 2019. Anna Kendrick moved on to date fellow comedian Bill Hader.
The Into the Woods star has expressed her desire to keep her relationships private and out of the spotlight, thus not wanting to name her ex outright. When asked by The Sydney Morning Herald about her relationship with Ben Richardson in 2022 she said, “Well, as far as keeping it private, it isn’t easy, as you are proving right now,” she told the outlet. “But that’s just always how it’s been for me.”
Anna started to talk about her abusive relationship with the unnamed ex in 2022 while she was promoting her film Alice, Darling. She called him a “toxic” ex-boyfriend and her “person,” saying they dated for six years and made embryos together. One anonymous user reported to DeuxMoi, “it’s clearly Ben Richardson, their engagement ended in 2020. The timelines for breakup, production and release of the new film add up to Hader.”
As for her current relationship status, she said that she needs one thing from a man if she’ll ever be in a relationship in the future. “I’m never getting involved with a man — meaning we’re not even kissing, we’re not even going to have a real conversation — unless you are in or have been in therapy,” she said on the podcast.
