Anna Kendrick Donated ‘Woman of the Hour’ Pay To Sexual Violence Survivors

After making her directorial debut Woman of the Hour, Anna Kendrick is donating her earnings to survivors of sexual abuse.

While opening up about the Netflix true-crime thriller, the Oscar nominee explained why she felt “gross” being paid for a film about ‘The Dating Game Killer’ Rodney Alcala‘s victims and survivors.

“Believe me, this was never a money-making venture for me, because all the resources went to actually making the movie,” she explained on the Crime Junkie AF podcast.

In addition to directing, Kendrick plays Cheryl Bradshaw, an aspiring actress in 1970s Los Angeles who finds herself courted by a serial killer (Daniel Zovatto) in the midst of a years-long killing spree, when they cross paths as contestants on popular game show The Dating Game.

“It wasn’t until the week before TIFF that I thought ‘Oh, the movie is going to make money,'” she added. “I went from being like, ‘Let me know when the movie happens,’ to being like, ‘Oh god I am responsible for this,’ and then it was making the movie, making the movie, we just barely made the deadline to get into TIFF, and then it was like, ‘Oh, there’s money gonna be exchanging hands,’ and I sort of asked myself the question, ‘Do you feel gross about this?’ And I did.”

Kendrick noted, “I’m not making money off the movie. The money is going to or has gone to RAINN and the National Center for Victims of Violent Crime. It’s still a complicated area but that felt like the least that I should do.”

Alcala was convicted of seven murders, which he committed between 1977 and 1979, but the actual count could be as high as 130.

In a recent interview with Deadline, Kendrick explained that she was attracted to the project because screenwriter Ian McDonald was able to capture “the beauty of these women and the vastness of their lives. To put so much heartbreak on the page was a surprise to me in a movie that I think people would put in the genre of thriller. So I just loved the script and of course, wanted to be in the movie.”

When discussing the violent scenes, Kendrick noted she took a page from the Coen brothers’ book, using a “descending scale of violence” like No Country for Old Men. In some scenes, she opted not to show the violence at all, instead just letting the struggle play out offscreen.

“I think your imagination is always gonna be worse in some ways,” said Kendrick. “But also I don’t like showing this, and I did have this impulse to kind of contrast the beauty of the setting almost as a representation of the beauty of this woman’s whole life that she had before this moment and that she deserves to live after this moment as just kind of a backdrop for what we understand is happening.”