Pitch Perfect, Anna Kendrick, Twilight star, Rebel Wilson, musical

Today we've walked (yes, in LA) the three blocks between the photo studio and the bar on Santa Monica Blvd we're now sitting in, which, coincidentally, is the place where Anna had her first legal drink as a 21 year old. She waited outside until the stroke of midnight on her birthday, when the bouncer could finally let her in. "I wanted to have a cocktail, but the people I was with said it was too embarrassing, so I probably just had a beer instead." This is a typical Anna Kendrick anecdote, one where she plays up her insecurities.

It's reason #2 to love her. She's always had more time for neurotic people than the confident, "especially when someone will point out that someone else has used a word wrong," she says. "I always think, 'Oh go fuck yourself. Do you know how embarrassed they are right now? Just let them figure it out three years from now when they hear someone else use the word.' The person who does that is the person who goes, 'I don't get embarrassed that easily.' I very briefly dated a guy who said, 'I don't get jealous, I don't get embarrassed, I'm basically the best man.' I thought, 'This isn't going to last very long.'"

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Reason 3 to love Anna Kendrick: from breathless, envious Jessica in The Twilight Saga, to Natalie, the contradictory junior executive in Up In The Air (for which she earned an Oscar nomination in 2010), to Cinderella in Into The Woods, there's no pigeon-holing her. She started her acting career on stage (and was nominated for a Tony Award for High Society when she was only 12), and musicals seem to be the only constant on her varied CV. So far she's racked up three on screen: Pitch Perfect, The Last Five Years and last year's smash hit Into The Woods, which saw her jetting around the world to premieres with Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt. But even with Meryl at her side, she finds the red-carpet experience awkward. Every year that goes by, I think that my on-camera smile is going to get easier, she admits. And it's got worse and worse, to the point where I'm giving that Britney Spears terrified smile, where the lips are upturned, but there's nothing but fear in the eyes. She continues, I'm also the queen of ruining group photos. All my friends will be smiling and looking really pretty, and I'll be there pretending to pick my nose. Or actually picking my nose. It's a fine line.

One group she'll be photographed with a lot this month is the Pitch Perfect cast, with whom she's reunited for the sequel. It sees the Barden Bellas competing in an international competition that no American team has ever won. It's a lot like school, she says of the group's off-screen relationship. Some of the girls got me into The Bachelor, so that became a group texting moment for us, and when you get back together, you remember every little quirk of everyone's personalities. Because we're basically shooting the same movie again - different scenarios, but in a lot of ways, very much the same, so it was trippy. It was like, didn't we make this already? Was the first one just a fever dream? Or a premonition, and this is actually the real thing?

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One thing no one predicted was the popularity of the original film. It made £73million at the box office, which is relatively modest in cinema terms (comparatively, Bridesmaids took £187million; Fifty Shades Of Grey made around £170million in its opening weekend). But, once digital downloads and DVD sales were factored in (approximately £87million after the soundtrack went triple platinum and Anna herself scored a hit on the Billboard Top 100 with the Cups song), the studio sat up and took notice.

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For the audience, a film centred around what women do (and say) when men aren't looking - and had romance as a secondary theme - was refreshing, to say the least. Anna is more glib about its appeal. "You put together some singing and dancing and slick camera moves, and then throw in a couple of vagina jokes, and people like it," she cracks. More seriously, she credits scriptwriter Kay Cannon with its success, even if it means that since then Anna's been deluged with scripts that are basically Pitch Perfect-lite. "Kay's the reason I did the first movie and it's because the script is so much smarter than it even needed to be," she explains. "She fills every moment of her work with wit, whereas a lot of the scripts I'm sent are funny concepts, but lazy execution. A lot of people hand me a script in the tone of Pitch Perfect and I'm like, I think you're underestimating how much work went into how tight that script was."

She adds, "The weird thing is it happened so slowly. It made $65million [in the US], which is good but not great. It wasn't until VOD and iTunes that anybody thought about making it a franchise. There wasn't one moment where I thought, 'Ha! Women are a draw to the box office.' Hopefully this one will mean something to the people who work in business affairs." Still, she's pleased if it helped other female-driven movies get made. "You just want to make sure the movies getting made about women are elevated and not just low-stakes 'girl problems'."

Does she ever keep the Bechdel test - in which a story is rated by whether there are two or more female characters, who talk to each other about something other than a man - in mind when she's reading scripts? "Oh, I should, shouldn't I?" she cries. "Oh God. I'm trying to think what I'm reading at the minute. I've got a couple of things on my desk that it's so hard to choose between. Maybe that should be the decider." She shrugs. "Better than a coin toss."

Reasons to love Anna Kendrick #4: she genuinely eschews the fame game. "Part of it is because I'm dressed really boring in sweatpants and sneakers," she says, as to why she rarely gets papped. "So those pictures just don't sell. You need to be really styled - in the perfect leather jacket and little booties, and have your red lipstick and your coffee - and I haven't managed that yet. If I've got jeans on, it's a good day." (Today is a good day; she's paired them with a Breton top.) Dating outside the celeb pool also helps. Her relationship with cinematographer Ben Richardson is wonderfully low-key ("a pretty sweet situation," she quips). It helps that she doesn't take any of it too seriously. "I remember meeting Lena Dunham after she had done Tiny Furniture and I was asking her about doing press for something so personal. She said, 'Oh, I make up new stuff every time. I just say, everything in it is true, or everything in it is made up.' Because people reference things you say in interviews as if it's your definitive feeling. Half the time I don't know where a sentence is going when I start it."

She does take pains to carefully craft her Twitter gags, though. "The one thing I agonise over is how to make it make sense when you read it," she says. "People think, 'Is that too risqué? Is that too crazy?' But most of the time I don't have the instinct to post anything risqué."

So she still has a filter. "I don't know. Get me drunk and see what happens." Pleasingly, Anna seems to be one of the few famous people who not only admit to drinking socially, but also talk about hangovers the way a civilian would. Both are practically taboo in Hollywood. Anna agrees. "I went to this bar-tending class for a magazine interview and when I linked to it online, I said, 'I got drunk for this interview.' A bunch of outlets put headlines like, 'Anna Kendrick admits she got drunk.' But for me to admit it, doesn't that mean I need to deny it? I talk about it all the time, so why are you allowed to spin this as how I let everybody down? Sometimes I wonder, is it because I look young and people think I'm going down the path of the Lohan or something?"

In fact, this year Anna turns 30. "I feel like 29 is just total garbage, I'd rather just be 30 for two years," she says. "When I say I'm 29, I think I sound like I'm trying to make sure everybody knows I'm not 30." You don't look anywhere near 30, I tell her. "Yeah, I look like a teenager," she says. "I really like '50s-style dresses, but they make you look childish, and I don't want to look like one of those people trying to look like a little schoolgirl." Her aim for the next decade? "I'm trying to give a message to the world that I am a grown up." She gives a rebellious smile. "I'm a woman, here's my bitchy resting face."

If that's not reason #5 to love her, I don't know what is.

Pitch Perfect 2 is in cinemas from May 15

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