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In real life, Elizabeth Banks is more force of nature than shrinking violet.
She’s an actress with huge franchises to her name, including The Hunger Games and Pitch Perfect. She’s in the small but exclusive club of actors who are also successful directors. The last feature she directed, Cocaine Bear, grossed over $90 million on a production budget one-third that size. She’s a prolific film and television producer, about to go to SXSW with a new passion project. And she’s a wine entrepreneur.
So, it might be something of an inside Hollywood joke that her latest character, in The Miniature Wife, which premieres on Peacock in early April, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer who is accidentally, well, downsized to six inches tall.
Based on a short story by Manuel Gonzales, 52-year-old Banks plays Lindy Littlejohn, a successful novelist and Washington University creative writing professor who’s hoping to have a bit of a relationship renaissance with her self-absorbed scientist/entrepreneur husband, Les (Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen). But Les is aiming for a financial windfall thanks to his developments in miniaturization.
Anyone who’s seen Honey, I Shrunk the Kids can guess what happens next.
“I loved the idea from the jump,” says Banks, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “It’s a relationship study. It’s about the power dynamic of a couple. It’s about a woman who lives in a world that’s not made for her. It has this absurdist lens. It’s certainly a metaphor for feeling small in the world. As women, all of our hopes and dreams and desires are always being minimized. We’re so often made to feel small.”
The Miniature Wife creators Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner, who previously worked on Goliath and Boardwalk Empire, among other shows, insist that Banks was their first choice to play the role.
“She has this ability to move seamlessly from the most ridiculous physical comedy of battling a giant fly to the raw vulnerability of giving her daughter, with whom she has a strained relationship, a nose hug—all while being six inches tall,” they say. “She’s such a gifted physical comedian. Her comedic timing is brilliant.”
Comparisons to Lily Tomlin in the 1981 camp classic The Incredible Shrinking Woman are inevitable.
To play Lindy’s sometimes bumbling, sometimes narcissistic, sometimes caring husband, Banks waited for Macfadyen to become available. “I was really looking for someone who matched the tone, and he just really checked every box,” Banks says. “We didn’t offer it to anyone else, and he’s such a delight.”
“Acting together was just a blast,” says Macfadyen. “She’s super smart, super funny, with a real emotional heft. It was a joy to navigate the insanity of Les and Lindy’s relationship over these 10 episodes.”
Banks, who grew up the eldest of four kids in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, did not expect how hard playing the role would be.
“My husband [producer Max Handelman] says I was the least mentally prepared for this job than any job in my entire career,” Banks says. She, Macfadyen and the rest of the cast spent a lot of time reading the scripts out loud and getting to know their characters.
“You just imagine you’re going to be making the scenes with that person,” she says of her many moments with Macfadyen on paper. But when it came to actually shooting the show, 70 percent of it involved green screen work alone, pretending to be half a foot tall.
Banks had worked with green screens before, notably when she played the villain Rita Repulsa in the Power Rangers reboot in 2017. “But there were a lot of practical effects. They dressed me up and attached me to wires, and they’d fly me around,” she says.
Macfadyen would be off reading lines into a microphone, and “I’m in a coffee mug in front of a green screen making eye contact with a ball on a stick,” Banks recalls. “I felt very vulnerable sitting alone with nothing around me, having to create the entire reality at all times.”
Still, Banks made everything fun, say Ames and Turner. “Elizabeth committed to every ridiculous bit. One of our favorites is Lindy burning down the dollhouse. Elizabeth rode around on the green screen set on an electric scooter covered in ash and laughing maniacally. She really went for it that day, and it was a sight to behold.”
“I think it’s fun and funny, and I want people to think about the dynamics in their own families. What does ambition and selfishness look like in the modern world?” Banks says of what she’d like audiences to take away from The Miniature Wife.
The goal, she adds, was to create something “that feels oddly relatable, but also like nothing else on television.”
As a producer, actor and director in a changing Hollywood landscape, Banks thinks it’s more and more important to do that. “It’s really all about how to be as fresh and entertaining as possible,” she explains. “How do you tap into things that are in the zeitgeist, and how do you make old things feel fun and new?”
Part of that involves keeping tabs on what her two teenage sons, Magnus and Felix, enjoy. “They’re not watching Euphoria, and they’re not allowed to be very online,” she says. “But we love to watch shows together.” Among them: Only Murders in the Building, The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park. “Teenage boys love that stuff.”
At the same time, it’s interesting to Banks that “old stuff is new again.” Her kids are watching The Office and Reno 911!, while she’s constantly approached by young fans who’ve just seen her in The Hunger Games, even though the first film in which she played creepy stylist Effie Trinket was almost 15 years ago.
“I’ve so moved on, but what a gift,” Banks says of the blockbuster series. “Effie is still alive and well.”
The truth of the matter, Banks says, with a dash of humor, is that “I’m in a bunch of iconic movies, man.” There’s The Hunger Games. There’s Pitch Perfect. There’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
“You always set out for icon status,” she jokes. “Why try to be anything else less than?”
But how do you reach iconic movie status? Is there a formula? Banks thinks so. “You give audiences something that’s a little bit safe and then you go transgressive, a little bit messy and dangerous,” she says. “I think that’s where it happens.”
Whenever she considers a new project, she says, “I definitely make a box and say, ‘Are we checking icon status?’ You don’t always get there. It’s not the fault of the material. A lot of movies are made by a committee.”
For instance, the first time she heard the pitch for Bottoms, a teen comedy she produced starring Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri, “I knew it was going to have a voice. It’s about young people figuring out their life and how to get laid. That’s iconic.”
Banks will probably direct another movie next summer, “by the time my life and the scripts and the casting and the prep line up,” she says. But she tries to space things out, she explains. Making all 10 episodes of Miniature Wife involved spending six and a half months in Toronto, “and I’m also raising two kids, and I want to be home and with the family.”
She tries to be outside as often as possible. She loves to ski. “It’s six, seven, eight hours of moving your body—there’s nothing better,” she says. And though she loves Los Angeles, she misses the snow in Massachusetts. “I always say there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad gear. Get the right snow pants and get out there.”
She’s also trying to change the way we sip our pinot as the co-owner and chief creative officer of Archer Roose Wines, a luxury canned wine company. It’s all about storytelling, she says. “And drinking your way to a better planet,” Banks adds.
Whether she’s 15 centimeters tall onscreen or 5-foot-5 off it, Banks’ goal these days is disrupting the system. “That word didn’t exist when I was growing up,” she says. “But even then I was an ambitious go-getter. I’ve been collecting a paycheck since I was 12. I lived in a small town and wanted a big life.”
Mission accomplished.
“We live in an incredible time,” Banks says. “And if you’re a woman who does things, you’re disruptive. But you know what? It’s really fun.”
Hair: Kat Thompson
Makeup: Beau Nelson
Nails: Queenie Nguyen
Photo Assistants: Zach Fernandez and Liam Booker
Styling Assistant: Jaimee Hager
Production: Arzu Koçman for Productionising
Production Assistant: Balca E. Sagmanli
Photographed on location at Rosewood Estate, 500 St. Cloud Road in L.A.
