A cancer comedy-drama was hardly the obvious place for Anna Kendrick to find her people, but 50/50 delivered Lauren Miller Rogen. Kendrick played nervous therapist Katherine McKay, while Miller Rogen popped up as Bodie, yet their real chemistry happened off-screen. With Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Will Reiser, and Jonathan Levine dominating the set and press tour, Kendrick practically treated Miller Rogen’s arrival like a social emergency exit.

Now, Kendrick has come full circle, revealing that their first meeting was exciting enough to become an unexpectedly embarrassing and exciting three-hour talk.

At TIFF 2026, Anna Kendrick and Lauren Miller Rogen were talking about Babies, but their friendship began long before this new collaboration. Speaking to Deadline, Kendrick looked back at 50/50, where Miller Rogen was one of the few women around a press tour packed with Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jonathan Levine. Naturally, Kendrick was delighted whenever her fellow actress appeared.

"I don't know if she was like, why is this woman still in my house?" Kendrick joked to Deadline, recalling their first meeting for Babies. What she expected to be a quick conversation at Miller Rogen’s home somehow stretched to three hours, leaving Kendrick so mortified that she immediately called her agents to confess her social endurance.

The punchline is that the marathon meeting apparently went rather well, since Kendrick left thrilled by Miller Rogen’s script and the deeply personal story behind 50/50. Their first encounter may have begun with 50/50, but TIFF 2026 finds the pair coming full circle, now working together on a project that made Kendrick very glad Miller Rogen remembered her, as she told Deadline.

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With a filmography as charming as Anna Kendrick’s, winning people over hardly seems difficult, and Lauren Miller Rogen clearly felt the same pull.

Lauren Miller Rogen did not merely see Anna Kendrick as someone who could play Annie; she saw the exact actress her script had been waiting for. The filmmaker wrote Babies with Kendrick in mind, trusting her to navigate sarcasm, prickly humor, and emotional vulnerability without sanding down any of Annie’s complicated edges. That is quite the casting compliment.

The admiration also had some wonderfully practical evidence behind it. Miller Rogen sent Kendrick the script with a personal letter, prompting an immediate house visit that accidentally became a three-hour conversation. By the time Kendrick left, the actress had made her enthusiasm unmistakable, and Miller Rogen had found the collaborator she had imagined all along.

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What did you think of Anna Kendrick's little anecdote about her first meeting with Lauren Rogan? Let us know in the comments!