In 1978, a notorious serial killer found his next potential victim on national television. Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut Woman of the Hour is based on that true story. As you can see in the trailer above, Kendrick plays Sheryl Bradshaw, the bachelorette at the center of an episode of the 1970s blind-dating television show The Dating Game. “Bachelor #3, don’t let me down!” she laughs — a line with chilling significance as it becomes clear that Bachelor #3 is Rodney Alcala, the serial killer who became known as the Dating Game Killer.

Kendrick was originally attached only to star in Woman of the Hour, but eventually signed on to direct as well. “Once I pitched myself to direct the movie, I realized that I love the character, but I love the movie as a whole significantly more than I love the character,” she says. “I think I was particularly invested in the script and in pieces of the script that [my character is] not in, in a way that I normally wouldn’t be.” 

In this bizarre story of a serial killer and a dating game show, Kendrick saw something universal. “I really like the complicated journey of a woman who is shrinking herself and being very pleasing and then manages to rebel and take back some power,” she says. “I love the fact that it isn’t as simple as, ‘Oh, she asserts herself and everything works out great.’ Because this is the bargain we’re making every day: How much do I live authentically, and how much danger does that actually put me in?”

Screenwriter Ian McDonald agrees. “When Anna signed on to direct, she said the thing she always found interesting was that it’s a movie about the danger that comes with our willingness to be intimate with another person,” he tells Tudum. “And that’s the case every time you go on a date with someone you don’t know — you’re making yourself vulnerable. Of course, the flip side is you also don’t want to close yourself off to the world. And so it’s a vulnerability that’s necessary, but again, comes with risk.”

Woman of the Hour flips the serial killer story on its head, zeroing in on Alcala’s victims and the lives he cut short. Read on for more information about the movie, now streaming on Netflix.

What’s Woman of the Hour about?

Woman of the Hour is the stranger-than-fiction story of an aspiring actor in 1970s Los Angeles and a serial killer in the midst of a years-long murder spree, whose lives intersect when they’re cast on an episode of The Dating Game.

Kendrick and McDonald dove into the documented history of the Dating Game Killer and his victims — but the edges of the story had to be filled in. “The full episode of The Dating Game seems like it’s been kind of lost to time,” Kendrick tells Tudum. “I would say that the majority of [research] was my Newspapers.com subscription.” 

Kendrick stumbled onto a few leads of her own simply by driving around the city she calls home, Los Angeles. “One of the articles listed the address of [a] victim, and I knew where it was in LA,” Kendrick says. “And I immediately thought, ‘Oh my God, she could hear the ocean when she died.’ ” Kendrick called McDonald and the pair built one memorable moment around that spot, with the camera pulling back from crashing waves to a tragic crime scene.

When will Woman of the Hour be on Netflix?

Woman of the Hour is now streaming on Netflix. 

Who’s in the cast of Woman of the Hour?

• Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air, Pitch Perfect, A Simple Favor) stars as Sheryl Bradshaw
• Daniel Zovatto (It Follows, Lady Bird) plays Rodney Alcala
• Tony Hale (Veep, Arrested Development)
• Nicolette Robinson (The Affair, One Night in Miami… ) 
• Autumn Best (4400)
• Kathryn Gallagher (HBO Max’s Gossip Girl and the Broadway musicals Jagged Little Pill and Spring Awakening)
• Kelley Jakle (Pitch Perfect, 42)
• Pete Holmes (Crashing)

Kendrick delighted in casting relatively fresh faces who fit into the film’s 1970s milieu. “Some of these people are performers that I know,” she says. “But I love that the movie might be introducing some of the actors to a whole new audience.”

The Stars of Woman of the Hour React to the Script for the First Time

Is Woman of the Hour based on a true story?

Yes. Rodney Alcala really did go on The Dating Game — in the midst of committing a string of murders (he was ultimately convicted of seven murders in two states, and is suspected of many more). Screenwriter McDonald stumbled upon the Dating Game story on a true crime website, and was inspired to write a screenplay that landed on the Black List of best unproduced scripts in 2017. But the killer wasn’t what grabbed his attention. “The context around him was the thing that I found really interesting,” McDonald says. “He seemed to represent something that we were kind of wrestling with as a country at the time, which is ordinary people looking the other way so that bad people could get away with bad behavior.”

Alcala killed his first victim almost a decade before his appearance on the show, and continued to commit murders until his arrest the following year, which only underscores that idea. “In true crime circles you'll sometimes hear people say, ‘Oh yeah, he’s kind of like Ted Bundy,’ ” McDonald says. “But the truth of the matter is, he’s kind of the opposite. Ted Bundy was a chameleon. He was really good at pretending to be something he wasn’t. And Rodney Alcala really seems to have flouted a lot of his worst tendencies. It wasn’t that he was being sneaky, it’s that other people were kind of actively looking the other way.”

Kendrick saw this real-life, slow-motion tragedy as the driving force of the film. “There are so many heroes in this story, but the heroes were outnumbered and outgunned by basically incompetence and negligence and a culture that did not prioritize victims,” she says. 

Woman of the Hour hopes to reprioritize those victims, as much as it possibly can. “I’m not really interested in the real Rodney,” Kendrick says. “I was more interested in trying to depict the kind of experience that we are more likely to have.”