Elizabeth Banks calls ‘Cocaine Bear’ a potential “career-ender”
Discussing her forthcoming feature Cocaine Bear, Elizabeth Banks has called the project a “ginormous risk” and a potential “career-ender for me”. The movie is certainly outrageous, but the Hollywood actor-turned-director is clearly relishing the danger.
Cocaine Bear does what it says on the tin. Starring Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, Alden Ehrenreich, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Christian Convery, Brooklynn Prince and Ray Liotta in his final role, the film tells the story of a black bear who accidentally ingests $15million worth of cocaine after it falls from an aeroplane.
Speaking to Variety, screenwriter Jimmy Warden explained how he came across the story of “Pablo Escobear: the cocaine bear” while scrolling through Twitter. “I was like, ‘What the fuck is that?'” Warden recalled. “I went down a complete rabbit hole, just clicking and clicking and clicking.”
After transforming the story into a screenplay, Warden took the script to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of the production company Lord Miller. “It was one of those things where you hear the concept, and you’re like, ‘That’s interesting, but is there a real movie in it?'” Miller told Variety. “But Jimmy did a great job making it into something that would be fun — better than you’d imagine for something called Cocaine Bear.”
Then, in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Banks got hold of the script, having already built a good working relationship with Lord and Miller from her voicework on 2014’s The Lego Movie. It soon became clear that Banks had a clear vision of where she wanted to take Warden’s material. “She had a pitch deck, and it was pretty gory,” Miller said. “It had a lot of body parts and internal organs in it.”
“It had to feel like a NatGeo documentary about a bear that did cocaine,” Banks said of her understanding that the film would only work if the audience believed the bear was real. “It couldn’t be something silly. It couldn’t seem animated in any way”. Banks’ film is also rooted in what the director calls “a deep sympathy for the bear.”
“I really felt like this is so fucked up that this bear got dragged into this drug run gone bad and ends up dead,” she said. “I felt like this movie could be that bear’s revenge story.”
Cocaine Bear is set for release on February 24th, 2023. Check out the trailer below.
Never Miss A Scene
The Far Out Film Newsletter
All the latest film news from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.