No one wants to get sick before they have to sing in front of an audience – especially not Anna Kendrick when she has to perform alongside Justin Timberlake.
During an appearance on the December 20 episode of Dax Shepard Armchair expert podcast, the 39-year-old actress recalled performing a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” with Timberlake during the promotion Trolls at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival while both under the weather.
“We were both really sick,” said Kendrick, who plays a troll named Poppy in the animated film franchise alongside Timberlake, 43, as Branch. Their cover of “True Colors” appears on the soundtrack.
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“He’s so sweet and we were both very, very sick. But he’s one of the greatest pop artists of all time,” she explained. “We did a very, very simple version of ‘True Colors,’ and we just kept drilling it and drilling it and drilling it.”
The Cannes experience quickly became nerve-wracking for Kendrick, who continued, “Right before we were going to go on, he just sang his part to himself and added like, 20 riffs or whatever. And I said, ‘Are you will you do it that way?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, it’s good!'”
That’s when she realized about Timberlake: “You still have access to so much of your voice that I don’t have right now.”
Kendrick added, “But he was very sweetly like, ‘No, no. It’s going to be exactly how we did it. It’s going to be fine.’
In an interview from 2016 Trolls promotional cycle, Pitch Perfect star called the experience of working with Timberlake “obviously very exciting and scary, but overall absolutely wonderful.”
Anna Kendrick in October 2024.
Jason Mendez/Getty
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She described the performance as a “bucket list item”, saying at the time: “In what context would I ever sing ‘True Colors’ with Justin Timberlake at Cannes? But it happened. Life is funny.”
Kendrick and Timberlake have since starred in it Trolls sequels including Trolls World Tour and Trolls Band togetherthe latter of which “SexyBack” artist reunited with *NSYNC for “Better Place.”
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Source: HIS Education