Interview: Anna Kendrick on ‘The Accountant’

In The Accountant, Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is a math savant with more affinity for numbers than people. Behind the cover of a small-town CPA office, he works as a freelance accountant for some of the world’s most dangerous criminal organizations. With the Treasury Department’s Crime Enforcement Division, run by Ray King (J.K. Simmons), starting to close in, Christian takes on a legitimate client: a state-of-the-art robotics company where an accounting clerk (Anna Kendrick) has discovered a discrepancy involving millions of dollars. But as Christian uncooks the books and gets closer to the truth, it is the body count that starts to rise.

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The Accountant stars Oscar winner Ben Affleck, Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick, Oscar winner J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Jean Smart, and Cynthia Addai-Robinson, with Jeffrey Tambor and two-time Oscar nominee John Lithgow.

Arguably, the most surprising member in The Accountant’s stellar cast is Anna Kendrick. With a background more grounded in comedy and musicals, Kendrick is that bright spot of sunshine in a film otherwise colored by thrilling action. Let’s take a look at what’s been going on in Kendrick’s mind when she filmed The Accountant.

QUESTION: When director Gavin O’Connor first approached you about The Accountant, what drew you into the project and made you want to become involved? 

ANNA KENDRICK: The first thing was that my mom is an accountant, so I knew she would be really excited about a movie where math is kind of sexy and accountants are living in a dangerous, exciting world [laughs]. When I first met Gavin, I thought everything about him was thoughtful and very creative. I’d seen his film, Warrior, and think he has a real gift. And the idea of being in one of those movies where you get more and more out of it when you watch it over and over was really exciting to me. 

I’ll be honest—I had to read the script three times to understand what was going on. The movie is easier to follow because you’re looking at faces instead of words on paper. I don’t really like reading scripts because it’s a very bare bones format, but the second I finished this one, I immediately wanted to start over from the beginning—and that doesn’t happen to me. 

Q: What can you tell us about your character, Dana Cummings, and how does she cross paths with the title character, Christian Wolff, played by Ben Affleck?

AK: Dana is the first person to notice some inconsistencies in the bookkeeping at this company, Living Robotics. The company brings in Ben’s character, Christian, to figure out what’s going on and Dana just assumes that they’ll be working together. She doesn’t realize that people make him uncomfortable, so she has to work to break through his shell a little bit to participate in what she is excited about doing. She wants to do her job; she wants to figure out what’s going on; she doesn’t want to leave it in the hands of a stranger. So she has to balance wanting to be a part of the process against how much this guy clearly doesn’t like working with her. 

Q: How was it working with Ben and playing that dynamic between your characters? 

AK: Luckily, Ben is a very warm person, which made Christian’s onscreen treatment a lot easier to handle [laughs]. I had a great time working with Ben because he is very practical. I really admire that in actors—people who are trying to deliver the best performance they can while thinking about how many other people are trying to give a hundred percent in their job; who are aware of all the moving pieces and trying to service the project on a whole, not just themselves. He’s very much a team player, and I think that’s really valuable. So, I was very, very happy to be working with him as closely as we did on this one.

Q: You’re also both naturally funny people. Did you ever find yourself ad-libbing or throwing in jokes spontaneously?

AK: Well, I asked my mom for a couple of ad libs, actually [laughs]. It wasn’t the kind of material that I could easily ad lib, since it is extremely technical and a little bit above my pay grade in terms of math. So, I sent my mom the script and asked her to break down some of the stuff that I was confused about for me, because Dana really understands the accounting, and I wanted to play that authentically. 

I held onto what my mom told me after reading the script for about two months and then it went straight out of my brain [laughs]. But she had a couple comments for me, like, ‘Well, I think this person could have gotten away with it if they had done X-Y-Z ….’ So, on a couple of takes, I tried out a few of, and that was fun. It went well. I’m not sure it made it into the movie, but for a second the crew thought I was smarter than I was—to be able to come up with it off the cuff like that [laughs]. 

Q: How did it feel to be a math geek for those few months?

AK: So fun! I definitely know a lot of people—my mom included—who are really excited about things that I wish I could be excited about. Logically, I understand what makes them fascinating, but everybody’s brain is different—that’s the wonderful thing about humans.  So, I was really trying to bring that level of joy to something that, personally, I can’t get that much joy out of.

There’s a scene where Ben does some fast math in his head, and I was like, ‘I think Dana would find that pretty sexy, actually’ [laughs]. So, I tried to imagine that fast math is a thing that not only impresses me, but like makes me feel sort of infatuated. 

Q: It’s interesting that math is an intrinsic part of this tense thriller, in the midst of all this action. 

AK: Yeah, and it’s my favorite kind of action. It just speaks to how thrilling it was to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and to see Indiana Jones just cut right to the chase and shoot that guy. It has that kind of vibe to it. This guy is so advanced in not only math, but in combat, I suppose, that it’s really fun to watch him do that work. Dana doesn’t know about that for a big chunk of the movie, but it’s definitely exciting. 

Q: The film has an incredible cast, with actors playing different pieces in a complex puzzle, and your character works with Lamar and Rita Blackburn, played by Jon Lithgow and Jean Smart.  How were they to work with?

AK: I didn’t have a lot of scenes with them, but they were awesome. I love Jean Smart and was so excited to meet her. John Lithgow as well. We barely got to work together, but hanging out with him for two days was the most fun. He was warm and sweet, and so smart.  And you can tell he’s a theater guy, which I love. Theater people just have such an amazing vibe. I felt really lucky to get to hang out with him for a couple of scenes. 

Q:  What do you think Gavin brings to this story as a director, and how did you find working with him as an actor?

AK: It’s so interesting because Gavin is a man’s man in a lot of ways. You would think, drawing a first impression, that he wouldn’t be comfortable with high emotion, but he just loves it. He is so connected to the actors and has such an intimate feeling with them. It’s a really interesting dichotomy in a person—to see him be so controlled yet also willing to go to a lot of places emotionally with a group of people. 

Q: Looking back, was there a scene in the film that was especially fun or interesting to play or a moment during production that was particularly memorable for you? 

AK: The first thing I shot was the last scene in the movie, and I’m alone and have no dialog. I don’t know quite how to describe it, but it’s something of a cathartic moment for Dana. 

So, it was my first day working with a new director; we needed to accomplish something very specific; and I didn’t know how it was going to go—but I just had so much fun playing around with Gavin. It could have been one of those days that was just really frustrating and hard to correct because that moment is so small and so nuanced, but it was actually so much fun. I didn’t say a word all day, but, by the end of the day, I felt like, ‘Yeah, I think we put something good on the scene.’ That was fun. 

The Accountant opens today, November 2, across Philippine cinemas.