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We’ve come to know Anna Kendrick as the type-A chatterbox who shows up all perky and bright-eyed and launches into rapid-fire dialogue directed at whoever’s in her path. Most recently, that was Joseph Gordon-Levitt in “50/50,” and a few years back, Kristen Stewart in “Twilight,” in which Kendrick played a schoolmate.
What we don’t expect is a lot of eyeliner and a rebellious smirk, but that’s what we get from the 27-year-old actress in her new movie, “Pitch Perfect,” which follows college freshman Beca (Kendrick), who aspires to be a mash-up-mixing DJ, but is recruited into her school’s dorky a cappella singing group.
The bad-girl image seems a left turn for Kendrick — but music-wise, the role makes sense. The Portland, Maine, native got her start at 12 on Broadway in the musical “High Society,” for which she was the third-youngest Tony nominee ever. Her first film was the 2003 musical “Camp,” about an upstate New York arts retreat. So ending up in a movie about singing actually brings everything full circle.
“The funny thing is the music actually had nothing to do with why I wanted to do it,” she tells The Post. “The fact that I come from a musical theater background helped me to be comfortable, but I was really just drawn to the humor. I thought I knew what to expect when I started reading the script, and [screenwriter] Kay Cannon surprised me at every turn. She writes for ‘30 Rock,’ which I think is one of the best shows of all time.”
As far as her character, though, “it was definitely a new experience trying to play the cool girl,” she says. “I found the best way to do that was to kind of break her down. I wanted her to look as silly and uncomfortable as possible, I think that’s how you get an audience on your side.”
Kendrick ends up playing the straight woman to one of the new leading ladies in comedy, Rebel Wilson, known for her role as Kristen Wiig’s roommate in “Bridesmaids” and as the bride in the “Bachelorette.”
“She’s so much fun!” gushes Kendrick. “Plus, one of my favorite things about Rebel, that’s really surprising, is she used to be a lawyer. She’s incredibly smart. One day on set she was like, ‘Hey guys, they’re trying to make us come in on Sunday after a six-day week. They can’t do that!’ It was like having a union rep on set! She’s, like, this secret genius.”
With her connection to “Bridesmaids,” Wilson also helps anchor “Pitch Perfect” in the new genre of edgy female comedy, involving a liberal amount of vulgarity and a couple of projectile-vomiting scenes, courtesy of actress Anna Camp.
But Kendrick says the screenplay didn’t start out with that intention. “It never occurred to me that this was a women’s comedy,” says Kendrick. “Kay Cannon was saying the same thing! She rushed over to [co-star] Brittany Snow and me one day [on a press tour] and was saying, ‘You guys, I didn’t even realize I’d written a women’s-empowerment comedy!’ ”
But for Kendrick, her shining moment in this film is the empowerment of full-on Internet dorkiness. In her audition scene, she pulls out a cup and does a routine in which she sings while tapping out a rhythm on the cup — tougher than it sounds.
“I saw this video on Reddit and I spent an entire afternoon learning how to do it,” she says. “It’s this summer camp game where you’re supposed to pass the cup and see how fast you can do it without stopping the song. My poor roommate was home at the time. He didn’t realize he had to sit through two hours of me messing it up.”
Her other big moment comes when she busts out her rap skills, reeling off Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” in an a cappella sing-off.
Shooting the scene was one thing, she says, but recording it in the studio, “was humiliating, because at least in the scene Beca is embarrassed when she’s doing it. When I had to do it in the studio, it had to be completely real and committed.
“I mean, in my car, that’s fine,” she adds. “But that’s like my secret world, singing ‘99 Problems.’ That’s, you know, Anna’s alone time.”
sstewart@nypost.com