Anna Kendrick remembers performing with Justin Timberlake while he was “really sick” – and why it made her nervous

No one wants to get sick before singing in front of an audience – especially Anna Kendrick when she has to perform alongside Justin Timberlake.

During an appearance on the December 20 episode of Dax Shepard Armchair expert On the podcast, the 39-year-old actress recalled performing a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” with Timberlake during promotion Trolls at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival while both were unwell.

“We were both really sick,” said Kendrick, who plays a troll named Poppy alongside Timberlake, 43, in the animated film series as Branch. Their cover of “True Colors” appears on the soundtrack.

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“He’s so sweet and we were both really, really 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 and drilling and drilling it.”

The Cannes experience quickly became nerve-racking for Kendrick, and he continued: “Right before we were about to go on, he was just singing his part to himself and adding like 20 riffs or whatever. And I said, ‘Is that you?’ Am I going to do it like this?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, it’s OK!'”

That’s when she realized about Timberlake: “You still have access to so many parts of your voice that I don’t have right now.”

Kendrick added, “But he said very nicely, ‘No, no. It will be exactly the way we did it. It’s going to be okay.’”

In an interview from 2016 Trolls advertising cycle, the Pitch perfect star called the experience of working with Timberlake “obviously very exciting and intimidating, but overall absolutely wonderful.”

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She described the performance as “a wish list” and said 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 Trolls Sequels included Trolls World Tour And Trolls band togetheron the latter, the “SexyBack” artist reunited with *NSYNC for the song “Better Place.”

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