The actress and producer opens up about getting meatier offers after 28 years in the business — and plenty of years playing ingenue or ‘comic relief’ roles
Elizabeth Banks has been in tons of varied projects since her acting career took off in the late ’90s: A sexy camp counselor in Wet Hot American Summer. A wise-cracking judge in the Pitch Perfect trilogy. The blood-thirsty Effie Trinket in the Hunger Games films.
Still, she points out that she’s very rarely the actual lead of a movie — let alone a serious movie like her new film, A Mistake, where she plays both a New Zealander and a surgeon who gets caught up in a scandal at the hospital.
“It’s because I was a great ingenue for a long time. I played the lady in many movies to some great leading men,” she continues. “And then I had smaller roles in huge movies like The Hunger Games and Pitch Perfect, but never quite that DC or Marvel movie lead.”
She’s a comedic force, which, in a way, may have prohibited her from exploring her range.
“I’m often given more comic relief parts,” she says. “So to have this offer felt like, wow, I’m going to be in every scene of this film, playing a character that’s very good at their job, it’s all very serious.”
To get into the part, she was trained by the medical consultants for Grey’s Anatomy — and she also took on a New Zealand accent. “I listened to a lot of podcasts,” she says, adding that she also worked with a vocal coach to nail down the dialect.
The story of A Mistake follows a surgeon training another fellow trying to save the life of a patient who has sepsis. When she allows her colleague to cut and he botches it, the move may (or may not) have led to the patient’s death.
“I’m somebody who puts a lot of faith in doctors, and this was a reminder of how human doctors are,” she says. “They have bad days and off days, and days of learning, and days where their confidence is low. So I just felt like that was a fascinating idea, just that this could and does happen.”
While Banks is thrilled to explore new roles, she’s also busy with her production company, Brownstone Productions, which she formed in 2002 with her husband, Max Handelman. The company produced hits like Pitch Perfect, The Beanie Bubble and Cocaine Bear.
